Love Quote by Billy Graham

Graham pulls a clever rhetorical feint: he borrows the dictionary, that secular referee of meaning, to legitimize a word many Christians treat with suspicion. By defining romance as “excitement, adventure, and something extremely real,” he rescues it from the cheapened register of infatuation and turns it into a moral category. “Extremely real” is doing quiet work here. It’s a warning shot at the culture of fantasy-romance - the crush, the fling, the cinematic spark - and an insistence that durable love is not less thrilling than the short kind; it’s more true because it survives contact with ordinary life.

The line “Romance should last a lifetime” sounds like sentiment, but Graham’s intent is pastoral and strategic. He’s aiming at married couples tempted to treat passion as a pre-marriage phase or a post-honeymoon luxury. In his world, commitment isn’t the enemy of desire; it’s the container that keeps it from evaporating. The subtext is accountability: romance is not something you “fall into,” it’s something you choose, maintain, and re-earn.

Context matters. Graham came of age in mid-century America, when evangelical leaders were trying to defend marriage as both sacred covenant and stabilizing social institution, especially as sexual norms liberalized in the 1960s and after. This quote offers a counter-narrative to both libertine spontaneity and puritan dryness: lifetime romance is not a contradiction. It’s the point.