What's a fuck when what I want is love?

The line contrasts the immediacy of sex (“a fuck”) with a deeper, more sustaining desire for emotional connection (“love”). In Miller’s characteristic blunt diction, the profanity functions less as shock than as a way to strip away euphemism and expose a raw hierarchy of needs: physical release is easy, transient, and ultimately inadequate when the speaker is craving recognition, tenderness, or belonging. Read this way, the quote dramatizes a recurring modernist tension between appetite and intimacy—how bodily encounters can fail to satisfy the longing for meaning, mutuality, and permanence. It also suggests a critique of reducing human relations to the merely erotic when the deeper hunger is relational and existential.