Aging & Wisdom Quote by Garry Shandling

Shandling smuggles a comedian's skepticism into what sounds like a romantic credo. He starts with "I'm an optimist" not as Hallmark cheer, but as a qualifier - optimism as a deliberate stance against everything he's observed about people. The line is built like a rehearsal for doubt: "Which is" and "I think" and "might be" keep the sentiment provisional, as if he's testing it onstage, listening for where it breaks. That's the Shandling move: sincerity delivered with the safety rails of uncertainty.

The intent is less to define love than to reroute it. Instead of passion or compatibility, he plants the flag on conflict management. "Work out their conflicts" treats intimacy like a practice, not a destiny - two people choosing the hard, unglamorous labor of staying in the room. The subtext is that conflict isn't a threat to love; it's the raw material. Commitment becomes the only believable romance because it survives contact with reality.

Context matters: Shandling's comedy, especially in The Larry Sanders Show, was obsessed with how people perform themselves and how relationships warp under ego, insecurity, and showbiz pressures. Against that backdrop, his definition of love as mutual growth reads like a hard-won concession, not a naive belief. It's also a quiet rebuke to the modern fetish for "no drama" partnerships: he assumes drama is inevitable, and he prizes the couple that can metabolize it into development. Love, for Shandling, isn't the absence of problems; it's the decision to keep becoming, together, anyway.