When you’re in love it’s the most glorious two and a half days of your life.

The line uses comic exaggeration to capture a distinctly Richard Lewis sensibility: romance is intoxicating, but fleeting, and quickly gives way to anxiety, disappointment, or self-sabotage. By specifying “two and a half days,” Lewis punctures the grand, idealized language of love with a precise, absurdly short time span—suggesting that the euphoria of falling in love is real but unsustainable. The joke also implies a worldview shaped by neurosis and pessimism: happiness arrives in brief bursts, and the speaker is already counting down to its end. As a one-liner, it functions as both a cynical observation and a self-deprecating confession.