How did Matthew Perry define love and relationships?

Love. Oh boy. Where do I even — okay. Here is the honest version. I was the guy on television that everyone watched fall in love forty-seven different times, and in my real life I was not great at it. I broke off engagements. I left women I should have stayed with. I stayed with women I should have left. The disease made me a terrible partner because the disease was always going to be the first relationship in the room, and that is not something the person sitting across from you signed up for.

But I learned a few things, eventually. Mostly from being on the other side of fifty and looking back. Number one — love is not the feeling. Love is what you do when the feeling is on a coffee break. Showing up. Picking up the phone. Apologizing first. Not keeping score. The Monica and Chandler stuff that everybody quotes to me at airports — the reason that worked on the show, beyond the writers being geniuses, is because at the core it was two people who decided to stop being too cool and just be honest with each other. That is the whole thing.

Number two — you cannot love anybody, romantically, until you can stand to be alone in a room with yourself. I could not do that for forty years. I had to be in a relationship, or on a stage, or in a crowd, or on a substance — anything but quiet, alone, with me. The work I did at the end on that — that was the most important love story of my life. And I am sorry it took me so long to figure out, because the women along the way deserved better than the version of me who had not done it yet.