Meaning & Analysis
When romantic love enters a relationship, friendship often ceases to exist or is overshadowed by the stronger force of love.
Insights
Superseding of Friendship
The proverb highlights the tendency of romantic love to disrupt or eclipse platonic friendship, implying that the two forms of attachment rarely coexist comfortably in the same relationship.
Transformation of Bonds
It suggests that the entrance of passionate or romantic feeling fundamentally changes the nature of an existing friendship, sometimes rendering it impossible to maintain the previous dynamic.
Conflict of Loyalties
The saying acknowledges the conflict that can arise when friendship and love compete for attention, trust, or exclusivity, often leading to jealousy, rivalry, or loss.
Literary and Philosophical Tradition
Writers from Lyly and Greene to Shakespeare frequently explored the precarious balance between love and friendship. In comedies and tragedies alike, romantic intrigue often severs or tests old bonds, as in Shakespeare’s ‘Friendship is constant in all other things save in office and affairs of love.’
Psychological and Social Reality
The proverb captures an enduring psychological truth: strong romantic attachments often alter social networks, priorities, and emotional landscapes, sometimes leading to the neglect or dissolution of former friendships.
Cultural Reflection on Loyalty
By lamenting the incompatibility of love and friendship, the saying reflects anxieties about loyalty, trust, and the hierarchy of human bonds, suggesting that passionate love tends to monopolize attention and exclude other intimacies.
Implicit Warning
The proverb serves as a warning about the fragility of friendship when confronted with romantic involvement—advising caution in mingling the two, lest both suffer.
Rhetorical Devices
Antithesis
The sharp opposition between love and friendship, set side by side, dramatizes the incompatibility and heightens the emotional tension.
Ellipsis
The omission of verbs in the phrase (‘when love puts in, friendship is gone’) lends conciseness and rhetorical punch, typical of proverbial style.
Metonymy
‘Love’ and ‘friendship’ stand in for the broader sets of emotions, loyalties, and relational dynamics associated with each, using single words to evoke complex human experiences.
Transcription
Quotations
Where love leadeth . . no friend [is] forced of.
Where loue beareth sway, friendshippe can haue no shew.
It were a poynt of meere folly to trust a friend in loue, sith Ouid in his booke de Arte amandi, had forbidden that, as principal.
He considered that . . where fancy forced, friendship was of no force.
You are my friend; yet as the Proverb says, When love puts in, friendship is gone.
Shakespeare Citations
In love Who respects friend?
Friendship is constant in all other things Save in office and affairs of love.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
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