Life & Wisdom Quote by Judith Viorst

Viorst’s line lands like a well-aimed pin to the balloon of romantic seriousness: love, she suggests, isn’t some metaphysical upgrade from liking so much as a mood shift with better lighting. The joke is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s a quip about semantics - how we inflate ordinary attachment into a grand category called Love. Underneath, it’s a sly diagnosis of what people often mean when they say they’re “in love”: not a deeper knowledge of another person, but a heightened version of the self.

“Except you feel sexier” flips the expected direction of romance. Instead of love being about devotion, sacrifice, or seeing the beloved clearly, it becomes a state that makes the lover feel more desirable, more alive, more starring-role. That’s not cynicism so much as clarity about the ego’s cameo in intimacy. Viorst is pricking the cultural script that insists love is pure and selfless; she’s arguing it’s also cosmetically self-enhancing, a kind of emotional push-up bra.

The line also reflects a particular late-20th-century sensibility - therapeutic, unsentimental, suspicious of grand narratives. As an author known for wry, psychologically literate observations, Viorst uses humor to smuggle in a hard truth: we often confuse chemistry and validation with commitment. The brilliance is how quickly it implicates the reader. If love is just like plus sexier, then the question isn’t “Is this real?” but “Who is this making me feel like?”