They have stopped deceiving you, not loving you. And it seems to you that they have stopped loving you.

Antonio Porchia’s line comes from his book of aphorisms, written over many years and published in Buenos Aires as *Voces* (“Voices”). Porchia, an Italian-born writer living in Argentina, composed these brief, paradox-leaning observations as standalone “voices” rather than as parts of essays or speeches. The remark belongs to the emotional and ethical terrain that *Voces* repeatedly explores—self-deception, the stories people tell themselves about love, and the painful clarity that can arrive when illusions fall away. It is best understood as a distilled reflection meant for contemplation, not as a comment tied to a single public event.

Porchia distinguishes love from the comforting deceptions that often accompany it. When someone stops “deceiving” you—no longer cushioning truths, flattering, or sustaining a mutually agreed illusion—you may experience the loss of that illusion as the loss of love itself. The sting comes from dependence on the deception: affection had been intertwined with being spared reality. The final sentence exposes a common cognitive error: equating the withdrawal of pleasing falsehoods with emotional abandonment. The aphorism thus critiques both the lover who needs illusion and the beloved who once supplied it, suggesting that honesty can look like coldness when one has learned to measure love by how well it protects one from truth.