Love Quote by Merle Shain

Shain writes like someone tallying a ledger of the heart, then flipping the spreadsheet in a single ruthless move: love is expensive, yes, but emotional austerity is the real bankruptcy. The line works because it concedes the objection up front. Loving can cost a lot acknowledges the bruises people cite as evidence that distance is “health.” Then she pivots to a harsher math: not loving always costs more. It’s a moral reframing disguised as pragmatism, aimed at the reader who prides themselves on self-protection.

The subtext is less romantic than it first appears. Shain isn’t selling grand passion; she’s warning about what happens when fear becomes a lifestyle. “Those who fear to love” aren’t villains, they’re strategists. They’ve learned to treat intimacy like a liability, to confuse control with safety. Her sting is in the phrase “want of love,” which carries the double meaning of lack and desire: you can be missing love and still craving it, stuck in a hunger you’ve trained yourself to deny.

Context matters: Shain wrote in an era when self-help, therapy culture, and second-wave feminism were reshaping the language of personal fulfillment. Her argument fits that moment’s insistence that emotional work is real work. The closing image - “an emptiness that robs the joy from life” - lands because it describes a slow violence, not a melodramatic heartbreak. She’s not threatening tragedy; she’s naming the quieter punishment of playing it safe until there’s nothing left worth protecting.