Humor & Life Quote by James Thurber

Love, Thurber suggests, isn’t a lightning bolt so much as a shared weather report. By defining it as “what you’ve been through with somebody,” he strips the word of its perfume-ad rhetoric and replaces it with mileage: arguments survived, illnesses managed, humiliations laughed off, money worries, boring errands, the whole unglamorous archive that actually tests attachment. It’s a comedian’s move, but not a cheap one. The line lands because it smuggles tenderness through understatement, refusing the melodrama that makes “love” easy to say and hard to trust.

The intent is corrective. Thurber aims his wit at the cultural fantasy that love is primarily a feeling - a permanent high, a cinematic certainty. His alternative is almost bureaucratic: love is a record of experiences you can point to. That phrasing quietly shifts love from private emotion to public evidence; it’s not just what you feel, it’s what you can show you endured together.

The subtext is a little bracing: if love is “what you’ve been through,” then it can’t be declared on day one and it can’t be maintained on vibes alone. It accumulates, like scar tissue or inside jokes, and it’s inseparable from hardship. There’s also a sly warning: someone can claim love fluently; only time can verify it.

Context matters. Thurber wrote in a mid-century America selling romance while bracing for depression-era aftershocks and wartime realism. His humor often treated modern life as absurd but survivable. Here, love becomes one more survival skill - less lyric, more lived.