Love Quote by Doug Coupland

Coupland turns romance into a rationed resource, and that small act of accounting is the whole provocation. “Only” and “six” land like a bureaucratic stamp on a feeling that’s supposed to be boundless. It’s funny in the tight, Coupland way - a deadpan rule-of-thumb that sounds like it could be printed on the back of a self-help book, yet it’s too bleak to be comforting. By giving love a quota, he smuggles in a distinctly late-20th/early-21st-century anxiety: the fear that even our most private experiences are subject to scarcity, optimization, and bad consumer choices.

The subtext isn’t that love is literally finite; it’s that modern life trains us to treat it as a high-stakes portfolio. “Choose wisely” echoes the language of schools, careers, mortgages - domains where one wrong decision “locks you out” of a better future. Coupland’s fiction often lives in that space where emotional life gets colonized by market logic and lifestyle branding. Here, the line pressures the reader to feel both urgency and suspicion: urgency, because six is not many; suspicion, because measuring love like this is precisely what makes people miserable.

There’s also a quieter melancholy under the joke. If love is countable, then each time you “use one up,” you’re closer to running out - a neat metaphor for aging, disillusionment, and the way adult choices narrow possibility. The sting is that the warning sounds practical, but it’s really existential.