Love Quote by Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan is trying to smuggle a radical idea into a deceptively cozy form: that marriage isn’t primarily a romance story, it’s a long-term civic arrangement between two people who choose to keep showing up. By putting “gay or straight” up front, he’s not just being inclusive; he’s flattening the culture-war divide and insisting on a single standard of durability. The line quietly rebukes the argument that same-sex marriage is an experiment in novelty. If the endpoint of a good marriage is friendship, then the gender configuration becomes beside the point; what matters is the shared life.

The phrasing does a second piece of work. “Even if they begin in romantic love” concedes the fairy-tale origin without surrendering to it. Romantic love is acknowledged as a spark, then demoted as a governing principle. Sullivan’s subtext is that contemporary marriage often collapses under the pressure to stay erotically electrified forever; friendship is his antidote to the consumer model of relationships, where partners are evaluated like products for “chemistry” and “fulfillment.”

The context matters: Sullivan spent years arguing for gay marriage in a public arena that treated it as either moral apocalypse or boutique lifestyle choice. Here he reframes marriage as a discipline of companionship - intimacy that looks less like constant desire and more like loyalty, humor, mutual care, and the ability to endure boredom without panicking. It works because it tells a truth people recognize but rarely advertise: passion gets headlines, friendship pays the rent.