Love Quote by Gerald Jampolsky

Love, in Gerald Jampolsky's framing, is less a feeling than a nervous system setting: the lights are on, the exits aren’t being scanned. As a psychologist writing in the human-potential wake of the 1970s and the popularization of A Course in Miracles, he’s pushing against a culture that treats intimacy like a contract negotiation and selfhood like a perpetual performance review. The line’s power is its absolutism. “Total absence of fear” is not how most people actually live, which is precisely why it functions as a provocation: if your version of love feels tight, vigilant, and scorekeeping, maybe it isn’t love you’re practicing but a well-mannered form of anxiety.

“Love asks no questions” sounds naïve until you hear the clinical subtext: fear interrogates. It cross-examines motives, demands guarantees, runs predictive models on abandonment. Jampolsky is naming the way suspicion masquerades as wisdom, especially in relationships where “I just need to know” often means “I need to control.” He isn’t arguing for stupidity or the suspension of boundaries; he’s arguing that the compulsive need for certainty is frequently a trauma response dressed up as rationality.

The final contrast - “extension and expansion” versus “comparison and measurement” - targets the metrics-obsessed self. Comparison shrinks the world into rankings: who loves more, who texts back faster, who is winning adulthood. Expansion imagines love as a practice that increases capacity: more patience, more generosity, more room for ambiguity. In a market society that trains us to quantify worth, Jampolsky offers a counter-metric: if it makes you smaller, it’s fear. If it makes you larger, it’s love.