Love Quote by Maggie Gallagher

Romantic love, Gallagher suggests, isn’t just a feeling; it’s a staged performance with rules, lighting, and a dress code called “reason.” That’s the sly bite of her opening: lovers don’t merely crave passion, they demand a credible story about it. Even when desire is irrational, we need it to look rational - not because we’re fooled, but because we want to be the kind of people who deserve what’s happening to us.

The subtext is quietly ruthless. Love becomes a mirror that flatters, then recruits. “We desire to be what romantic love makes us appear” frames romance as identity manufacture: the beloved’s gaze doesn’t just validate you, it drafts you into a higher role. And once you’ve been cast, you’re responsible for staying in character. The “facade” matters because it protects the couple from the embarrassing possibility that love is arbitrary, or worse, accidental. If love can’t be justified, it can’t be trusted.

Gallagher’s context - as a writer associated with arguments about marriage, norms, and the social scaffolding around intimacy - hums under every clause. She’s pointing to the way romantic ideology borrows from older moral vocabularies: worthiness, deservingness, reasonableness. Even modern romance, supposedly liberated and anti-judgmental, still asks for a verdict. The line reveals why people fight to narrate their relationships as sensible, even when they’re messy: not to convince outsiders, but to convince themselves they’re lovable for good reasons, not just lucky.