Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.

Judith Viorst’s line uses comic comparison to praise love by contrasting it with a string of increasingly mundane discomforts: catastrophe (an automobile accident), bodily constraint (a tight girdle), financial pain (a higher tax bracket), and modern travel irritation (circling in a holding pattern). The humor depends on the mismatch between love’s emotional grandeur and the prosaic annoyances set beside it, suggesting that love is not merely sublime but also palpably preferable to everyday forms of suffering. The specificity of “over Philadelphia” adds a lived-in, observational quality, grounding the sentiment in ordinary experience rather than idealized romance.