Love Quote by E. Y. Harburg

A love line with a wink, built for the popular songbook: desire as something portable, opportunistic, and just plausible enough to pass as romantic. Harburg - a Broadway lyricist who knew how to slip adult truths into hummable phrases - frames fidelity not as a moral stance but as a logistics problem. Distance doesn’t deepen longing; it reroutes it. The neat, almost singsong symmetry ("not near"/"near") makes the admission feel playful rather than cruel, like a comedian confessing before you can accuse.

The specific intent is double: charm the listener with an apparently candid vulnerability while smuggling in a justification for emotional (or literal) wandering. "The girl I love" sounds singular and sincere, but the second clause quietly reveals love as interchangeable, a verb that attaches itself to whoever happens to be within reach. It's a lyric that performs self-awareness: the speaker knows how flimsy he sounds, so he leans into the rhyme and rhythm to make flimsiness feel like honesty.

Context matters. Harburg wrote in an era when popular music thrived on clever innuendo and urbane cynicism - the interwar and mid-century stage where romance was often presented as a game smart people play to avoid looking needy. The line flatters the audience for catching the joke, then implicates them: who hasn’t, at some level, let proximity do the choosing? It works because it refuses the grand myth of devotion and replaces it with something more embarrassing, more human, and therefore more memorable.