It's not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Loving someone does not necessarily mean being able to build a life with that person. We can feel an extraordinarily intense connection, want their presence, miss them when they are not there, and still discover that our ways of understanding trust, commitment, or everyday life are incompatible. The feeling can be completely genuine while the relationship is unviable, an uncomfortable contradiction because we usually expect love to contain, by itself, everything needed to justify a relationship.
Perhaps that is why the distinction that appears in the line attributed to Nietzsche interests me. A relationship needs something that emotional intensity does not always provide: friendship, complicity, and the capacity to live with a person when everything that made being in love extraordinary momentarily disappears. Love can explain why we want to remain close to someone, but it does not necessarily teach us how to remain.
There are loves that arrive as an impact and change our priorities with an intensity that is hard to ignore, while others are built through a much less cinematic accumulation of conversations, silences, solved problems, and completely ordinary days. Both can be important, although the intensity with which a relationship begins says considerably less than we usually imagine about what will be able to sustain it later. That someone manages to make us feel extraordinarily alive shows that they can affect us deeply; it still does not show that we can share a life.
世上本无事，庸人自扰之
Shì shàng běn wú shì, yōng rén zì rǎo zhī
"Originally there are no troubles in the world, but mediocre people create them for themselves."
There is also a certain romantic tendency to think that, when a love is true, it should survive distance, time, or any circumstance. I would like human relationships to be that orderly, but they probably are not. There are deep bonds that disappear, people who were once indispensable and progressively stop being part of our life, and sincere relationships that simply fail to survive what happens afterward.
That does not retrospectively turn the love into something false. Perhaps we have associated duration with authenticity too easily, as if a relationship needed to be eternal in order to prove that it was once important. Some people stay and others do not, but both can change our history. Photographs, shared places, certain songs, or even small habits can keep something of a relationship long after the relationship itself has stopped existing, not because there is an invisible connection that obligatorily keeps together those who once loved each other, but because memory is also part of the way one person continues influencing another.
Love means that you accept a person with all their faults, stupidities, ugly points, and yet you see the perfection in the imperfection itself.
Here I have a small disagreement. I am not sure that loving consists in finding perfection inside another person's imperfections. Some imperfections remain deeply annoying after we fall in love, and it is probably better that way. Idealizing someone's flaws can feel romantic for a while, but really knowing a person requires something considerably less convenient: seeing them clearly enough to recognize what we admire and what we struggle to stand.
Accepting also does not mean tolerating everything. There are flaws we can live with, others we can work on together, and some that eventually make a relationship impossible. Loving a person should not force us to turn any of their behavior into an adorable peculiarity. The shelter a relationship can offer appears precisely when we can show ourselves imperfect without needing to pretend that our imperfections have no consequences.
Vulnerability matters precisely because of this. Allowing someone to know our fears, contradictions, and less presentable aspects means giving them information they could use to understand us or to hurt us. Over time, a couple learns which words calm and which ones can destroy an entire afternoon. Intimacy inevitably contains that risk. Trusting someone consists, to a certain extent, in allowing them to approach places we normally protect and progressively discovering that they do not need to use them against us.
I also do not think that loving is simply a "daily choice." There is something of a choice in caring for a relationship, asking for forgiveness, keeping agreements, or staying through difficult periods, but we cannot decide to feel anything indefinitely. Sometimes one can do everything correctly and still discover that a relationship ended. Will matters, although it has limits, and recognizing them seems more reasonable to me than turning permanence into the definitive proof of love.
What we do choose fairly often is what we do with what we feel. We can love someone and treat them badly, just as we can go through moments of lower emotional intensity and keep caring for a relationship because there is friendship, respect, history, and a project we still consider valuable. That is precisely what the initial emotion cannot guarantee by itself.
That is why I understand love less as a shelter where we finally find someone who accepts us exactly as we are, and more as a relationship in which two people can get to know each other progressively without that knowledge necessarily destroying the affection. It does not always happen. It also should not happen at any cost. But when it does, there is something particular about discovering that someone knows our virtues without idealizing us, our flaws without romanticizing them, and still finds enough reasons to keep building something with us.
I do not know whether loving is always worth it. There are loves that can make us better and others we should probably learn to leave. What I do believe is that loving well requires something harder than finding perfection in another person: seeing them with a certain clarity, allowing them to see us too, and discovering what we can build after both of us have stopped being an idea.
