Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.

The line defines love not as a sudden feeling or idealized romance but as something forged by shared experience—especially endurance through difficulty. It suggests that intimacy is cumulative: what binds two people is the history they have survived together, the compromises made, the disappointments absorbed, and the mutual knowledge gained over time. In this view, love is less a private emotion than a record of loyalty and persistence, measured by what a couple has faced and still chosen to remain. The aphorism also carries a quietly skeptical, Thurber-like realism: love is proven in the lived, sometimes messy aftermath of events, not in declarations.