Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.

The saying defines love not as a sudden passion but as friendship intensified—“caught fire”—and then sustained by character rather than mood. Its key terms (understanding, confidence, sharing, forgiving, loyalty) frame love as a set of practiced virtues and mutual commitments. The final sentence rejects perfectionism: durable intimacy depends on tolerating flaws and making “allowances” for ordinary human limits. In Landers’s advice-column ethos, this is both consoling and prescriptive: it reassures readers that imperfect relationships can still be genuine, and it urges them to measure love by reliability and grace under strain, not by constant excitement or faultlessness.