"One does not fall in love; one grows into love, and love grows in him"
About this Quote
Menninger strips romance of its pratfall. “One does not fall in love” is a quiet rebuke to the popular story that love is an accident - gravity, fate, chemistry, a banana peel. “Fall” makes the lover passive and slightly ridiculous; it excuses immaturity, impulse, even cruelty (“I couldn’t help it”). Menninger, a clinician steeped in the slow weather of human change, swaps that melodrama for development: you “grow into love.” The verb choice is everything. Growth implies time, friction, setbacks, and responsibility. It’s less a lightning strike than a practiced capacity.
The line’s second move is sharper: “and love grows in him.” Now love isn’t just a relationship status; it’s an internal construction. Menninger’s psychology foregrounds character formation - the idea that intimacy is as much about becoming someone capable of care as it is about selecting the right object of desire. The subtext is almost moral without sounding sermon-y: love is cultivated, and cultivation requires attention. It’s also a corrective to a culture that treats feelings as sovereign. If love can grow, it can also wither; it needs conditions.
Context matters. Menninger wrote in a 20th-century moment when psychiatry was trying to translate private suffering into patterns: attachment, dependency, maturity, neurosis. Against the romantic marketplace that sells “falling” as authenticity, he offers love as an achieved skill - a psychological milestone. That’s both comforting and unsettling: comforting because it suggests agency; unsettling because it removes the alibi of fate.
The line’s second move is sharper: “and love grows in him.” Now love isn’t just a relationship status; it’s an internal construction. Menninger’s psychology foregrounds character formation - the idea that intimacy is as much about becoming someone capable of care as it is about selecting the right object of desire. The subtext is almost moral without sounding sermon-y: love is cultivated, and cultivation requires attention. It’s also a corrective to a culture that treats feelings as sovereign. If love can grow, it can also wither; it needs conditions.
Context matters. Menninger wrote in a 20th-century moment when psychiatry was trying to translate private suffering into patterns: attachment, dependency, maturity, neurosis. Against the romantic marketplace that sells “falling” as authenticity, he offers love as an achieved skill - a psychological milestone. That’s both comforting and unsettling: comforting because it suggests agency; unsettling because it removes the alibi of fate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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