"Lust is what keeps you wanting to do it even when you have no desire to be with each other. Love is what makes you want to be with each other even when you have no desire to do it"
About this Quote
Viorst slices through romance-myth fog with a therapist-adjacent bluntness: she refuses to let sex stand in for intimacy, or intimacy stand in for sex. The line works because it’s built as a clean mirror sentence, almost a nursery-rhyme in structure, then lands like a cold washcloth. Lust and love are defined not by their peak moments but by their off-days. That’s the trick. She relocates truth from the fireworks to the maintenance.
The subtext is quietly radical for a culture that sells “chemistry” as destiny. Lust, in her framing, is efficient and a little indifferent: it can survive actual incompatibility because it’s fueled by appetite, fantasy, the body’s momentum. Love, by contrast, is inconvenient. It persists when the body isn’t cooperating, when stress, age, resentment, or exhaustion flatten desire. The emphasis on “even when” is the moral center: real attachment shows up precisely when the easy incentives disappear.
Context matters. Viorst’s broader work has long specialized in unsentimental emotional literacy, especially around adulthood’s compromises and the private negotiations inside long relationships. This quote reads like a corrective to both prudishness and the libido-obsessed self-help economy. It doesn’t demean sex; it demystifies it. And it doesn’t idealize love; it measures it by presence, not passion.
Underneath, there’s permission: you can have a dry spell and still have a bond. You can have heat and still have nothing like a life together. That clarity is the comfort and the sting.
The subtext is quietly radical for a culture that sells “chemistry” as destiny. Lust, in her framing, is efficient and a little indifferent: it can survive actual incompatibility because it’s fueled by appetite, fantasy, the body’s momentum. Love, by contrast, is inconvenient. It persists when the body isn’t cooperating, when stress, age, resentment, or exhaustion flatten desire. The emphasis on “even when” is the moral center: real attachment shows up precisely when the easy incentives disappear.
Context matters. Viorst’s broader work has long specialized in unsentimental emotional literacy, especially around adulthood’s compromises and the private negotiations inside long relationships. This quote reads like a corrective to both prudishness and the libido-obsessed self-help economy. It doesn’t demean sex; it demystifies it. And it doesn’t idealize love; it measures it by presence, not passion.
Underneath, there’s permission: you can have a dry spell and still have a bond. You can have heat and still have nothing like a life together. That clarity is the comfort and the sting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
|---|
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