When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.

The line contrasts genuine love with an idealizing or controlling attachment. To “love the person as they are” implies an acceptance of another’s full reality—virtues, flaws, limits, and autonomy—rather than treating them as a project to be improved or a fantasy to be fulfilled. The second clause (“not as you’d like them to be”) critiques a common self-centered form of affection in which one loves an imagined version of the beloved that serves one’s desires. Read this way, the quote functions as an ethical maxim: love is measured by recognition and respect for the other’s actual personhood, not by the intensity of one’s wishes.