Love is not about staging the perfect proposal or creating a perfect relationship. It’s about learning to navigate the imperfections that are intrinsic to ourselves, our partners, and life itself.

I submit that love is essentially a much simpler phenomenon – it becomes complicated, corrupted, or obstructed by an unequal balance of power. We have seen that love demands a mutual vulnerability or it turns destructive: the destructive effects of love occur only in a context of inequality. But because sexual inequality has remained a constant – however its degree may have varied – the corruption 'romantic' love became characteristic of love between the sexes.

People are never perfect, but love can be.

Love isn't finding a perfect person. It's seeing an imperfect person perfectly.

Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature: it makes the proud man meek,—the cheerful, sad,—the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy, fall before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.

Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general sense and the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reason lies not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.

The love that is not all pain is not all love.

Love is only a recognition of our own guilt and imperfection, and a supplication for forgiveness to the perfect beloved. This is why we love those who are more beautiful than ourselves, why we fear them, and why we must be unhappy lovers.

You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.

Love is what you've been through with somebody

It was finally becoming clear to her that love wasn't about finding someone perfect to marry. Love was about seeing through to the truth of a person, and accepting all their shades of light and dark. Love was an ability.

You are young and might prefer to believe that love is moonlight and rosy sunsets. It is not. It is brutal, violent, ugly, possessive and dictatorial. It makes no allowances for the freedom and individuality of the loved one. Lovers become one closely knit unit in thought and feeling. Should you eventually find that this love is beyond your capacity or that you cannot rise to its demands, you may leave but please make sure that you go to some place where I will never be able to find you.

Love is needing someone. Love is putting up with someone's bad qualities because they somehow complete you.

People talk about love like it is patient and kind. Love is also dark. It is ferocious and angry and destructive.