“One does not love what one assumes”

The expression “One does not love what one assumes” names the distinction between taking on the unavoidable facts of existence and loving another person. In its account of conjugal relations, that distinction challenges the idea that the burdens and contingencies spouses share are themselves proof of love: to assume a situation may mean enduring it, while love moves freely toward another person and a future.

Assumption and Love

The argument begins with a contrast between what a person must assume and what a person can choose to love. A body, a past, and a present situation are unavoidable conditions of existence; accepting them does not make them objects of love. The text uses this difference to question a view of marriage in which each spouse is treated as an inevitable, unchosen presence in the other’s life—as necessary as the body is imagined to be for the soul.

Love, by contrast, is described as movement toward an other: an existence distinct from one’s own, with its own direction and future. When an imposed burden or tyranny is merely taken on, the fitting response is revolt, not the conversion of endurance into affection. The expression therefore refuses to let the fact of living together settle the question of whether the relationship is loving.

The Critique of Conjugal Love

This distinction challenges the confusion between assuming and loving that sustains the idealization of conjugal life. A marriage may bind two people through attachment, resentment, hatred, rules, resignation, laziness, and hypocrisy, yet those conditions do not establish an authentic human relation. Calling such a mixture love can instead make it an alibi for a union in which the spouses squander their freedom.

The argument does not equate freedom with momentary whim. Friendship and physical love alike require freedom, but a feeling can also involve commitment beyond the instant. What makes it free is that it does not depend on an outside command and is lived sincerely, without fear; the individual remains able to compare personal conduct with a general will, reaffirming the commitment or breaking it. By contrast, the message attached to “conjugal love” encourages repression and lies, and keeps husband and wife from genuinely knowing one another.

Intimacy Without Knowledge

Daily proximity does not by itself produce understanding or sympathy. The husband in the text avoids questions that would require him to recognize his wife’s secret autonomy: whether she takes pleasure in sex, loves him, or is happy to obey him. Such questions seem disturbing because they would unsettle the reassuring figure of the naturally virtuous, devoted, faithful, pure, and contented wife.

A brief example makes the cost of that assumption concrete. After receiving thanks from his friends, family, and nurses, a sick man tells his young wife—who has not left his bedside for six months—that she need not be thanked because she has merely done her duty. Her care is treated not as an act that might express a person’s choice or feeling, but as something guaranteed by society and built into the institution of marriage. The expression’s distinction clarifies the reduction: assuming a prescribed duty is not evidence of love, and treating it as such erases the person who performs it.

Significance

The expression condenses a broader criticism of relationships that mistake endurance for affection and social obligation for freely chosen attachment. It shifts attention from the mere fact of a shared life to the freedom and sincerity through which a relationship is lived. Marriage has no automatic claim to intimacy: without recognition of each spouse as an autonomous subject, routine and obligation can conceal rather than establish love.