It’s hard to imagine a successful relationship without love. But can love alone sustain a healthy relationship? For a short while, maybe yes. But definitely not for the long haul!
As beautiful as the feeling of love is, you need a lot more than a secondary emotion to hang your hat on ― that’s if you’re hoping to build a long-lasting and healthy relationship. If you’re in a toxic relationship, I’ve collected some Love Is Not Enough quotes to help you rethink your relationship and find your voice.
Qualities That Make Relationships Last
Before I get into the quotes, here are some important qualities (in addition to love) that make relationships healthy and strong.
Trust
No relationship can stand the test of time if trust is lacking. Acting all lovey-dovey is easy when nothing happens to create doubts. But trust can keep your relationship afloat when there are reasons to question your partner’s loyalty.
Mutual Respect
You’re probably with the wrong person if your partner doesn’t respect you. Relationships thrive when partners have a healthy respect for each other. Snap judgments and undue criticisms will gradually eat away at love, eventually killing even the most loving relationship.
No matter how much you love someone, don’t ever sacrifice your dignity to keep the relationship. It is a major sign of a one-sided effort relationship if your partner belittles you or accuses you wrongly, and you don’t address it.
Compromise
A healthy relationship is one where partners are willing to shift grounds for the greater good of the union. Loving someone who always has their way to your detriment (in some cases) is unhealthy. The relationship is either toxic or heading for the rocks.
Patience and Tolerance
Without patience and tolerance, a romantic relationship is just a ticking time bomb; it can go off at any moment!
Love alone cannot forgive hurt. It takes patience and tolerance for partners to put themselves in each other’s shoes, understand the other person’s perspective, and forgive each other when mistakes are made.
Appreciation
Love can become too comfortable over time, and eventually, partners will take each other for granted. Cultivating appreciation and reciprocity helps lovers consider themselves privileged to share their lives with each other.
Why Love Alone Is Not Enough
Ever wondered why someone will put up with an abusive relationship? One of the reasons is love. They love their partner so much that they can’t imagine life without them. And this love makes them hopeful that their partner will change.
Unfortunately, people don’t change who they are just because someone else loves them. If anything, the loving partner enables the other person’s abusive behavior, making it a codependent relationship.
You might want to slow down your relationship or break things off with your partner because the relationship isn’t working. But making a move can be difficult if love is holding you back.
I encourage you to think about why love shouldn’t be the only reason you are in a relationship. Perhaps these reasons will help you find your voice and save yourself from further emotional distress.
- Love means different things to different people: For one person, love might mean saying nice things and making promises (even if they can’t keep them); for another, love could mean having a sense of completeness because they are with someone. Two people with incompatible ideas about love can hardly enjoy a fulfilling relationship unless they strive to cultivate commitment, patience, tolerance, and kindness.
- You can love the wrong person: As hard as it is to accept, you can love someone so deeply, and they love you equally, but you are just incompatible. Your values, goals, priorities, needs, and wants are too different that the relationship won’t work, no matter how passionate you are about each other. Sometimes, falling head-over-heels in love with someone doesn’t mean they are a good long-term partner for you.
- Loving someone doesn’t mean you can stand them: Intense feelings of love for someone you can’t stand can lead to a love-hate relationship. You pick fights over almost everything, yet you want to be with them. This is a clear sign of an unhealthy relationship; you either work the kinks out or break things off.
- Love doesn’t always outdo flaws: It is a mistake to love someone with apparent flaws in the hope that they will change. There’s no guarantee that love will make someone change their career, give up their bad habits, stop being workaholics, or get over their low-self esteem. Eventually, loving them becomes draining and exhausting, leading to an unhappy relationship.
- You can lose yourself loving someone:It is normal to make sacrifices for someone you truly love, but losing your identity ― giving up your values, goals, dreams, or career ― because you want to be with someone is too great a sacrifice to make. Unchecked love can be destructive and make you love yourself a little less; don’t fall into that trap.
Love Is Not Enough Quotes
You definitely want to reflect on these quotes if you’re not feeling like a priority in your relationship. They will help you find your voice and nudge you to seek help, break free from an abusive partner, or strive to create a healthier connection in your relationship.
- “Love without compatibility, love without compromise, love without self-examination and self-improvement will never sustain a healthy relationship.” – Joshua Klapow
- “Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.” – James Hillman
- “Knowing that we should love is not enough. But when knowledge is applied through service, love can secure for us the blessings of heaven.” – David B. Haight
- “I learned that saying you love your friends isn’t enough: that love is a verb – it requires acts of love. It is all about the doing, not the saying, and now I make a point, every day, of emailing or phoning or making a plan with those I love.” – Jane Green
- “Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone – but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.” – Quentin Crisp
- “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “It is not enough … simply to surrender oneself brainlessly to love; when it knocks at the door, one must also calculate because of later life, which does sometimes follow.” – Elfriede Jelinek
- “Love is an endless act of forgiveness. Forgiveness is me giving up the right to hurt you for hurting me.” – Beyoncé
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, these Love Is Not Enough quotes will help you put in more work to strengthen your relationship or reconsider being with your current partner if things aren’t working.
In any case, understand that healthy relationships are built on more than love alone. Making a loving relationship work takes commitment, trust, respect, forgiveness, and effective communication.
Love is undoubtedly an essential element in any healthy relationship, but it has limitations. With that in mind, you can work to cultivate other important qualities in your relationship to build a long-lasting and fulfilling connection with your significant other.
