Love Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge sketches love not as friendship turned up louder, but as a different chemical reaction entirely: sympathy is the social glue of friendship, while love contains a built-in counterforce, a friction that doesn’t cancel intimacy but powers it. That word "antipathy" is the provocation. He’s not praising cruelty or incompatibility; he’s naming the way erotic and romantic attachment often arrives with rivalry, envy, and a strangely appetitive restlessness. Where friendship consoles the self, love threatens to redraw it.

The engine of the line is paradox. "Each strives to be the other" turns desire into a kind of identity theft, a fantasy of total translation: if I could fully enter you, I’d finally be complete. Coleridge, a Romantic steeped in debates about the self, imagination, and unity, hears in that fantasy both transcendence and danger. Love aims at fusion, but fusion requires opposition - two distinct things with enough tension between them to create motion. Without separateness, there’s nothing to cross toward.

The clincher, "both together make up one whole", is deliberately double-edged. It romanticizes union, but it also implies that lovers risk becoming partial people, outsourcing their wholeness to the relationship. Coleridge’s insight lands because it refuses the tidy moral of compatibility: real love, he suggests, can be simultaneously communion and contest, a partnership that’s alive precisely because it isn’t perfectly smooth.