Love Quote by Marilyn French

Love, in Marilyn French's hands, isn't a greeting-card virtue; it's a hostile takeover. The line moves like a prosecutor's closing argument, piling clause on clause until romance starts to look less like a choice than a diagnosis. "The ancient Greeks knew that" is doing strategic work: it borrows authority from myth and philosophy to make this sound older than modern dating lore, a recurring human pattern rather than a personal grievance. It's also a sly rebuke to contemporary culture's insistence that love is inherently ennobling. If the Greeks could name it as mania, why do we keep calling it destiny?

French's intent is less to sneer at affection than to expose what gets smuggled in under the word "love": possession, abdication, and the glamorization of psychological collapse. The diction is pointedly clinical - "insanity", "delusion", "self-destruction" - but the subtext is political. French wrote in an era when women's lives were routinely narrowed by romantic scripts that demanded self-erasure and emotional labor while presenting that surrender as fulfillment. "You lose yourself" isn't mere melodrama; it's an indictment of a culture that trains people (especially women) to treat diminishing their own agency as proof of devotion.

The quote works because it refuses the usual soft focus. It describes love not as a feeling but as a mechanism: something that commandeers cognition ("can't even think straight") and dissolves autonomy ("no power over yourself"). French is warning that the most dangerous romances aren't the ones that look violent - they're the ones that feel holy while quietly rearranging the self into someone smaller.