Louisa May Alcott was deeply skeptical of the romantic notion that love conquers all difficulties without requiring work.
The marriages she depicts are loving but they are also demanding, complicated, and frequently imperfect in small and large ways.
Meg has to learn to manage a household without the resources she had imagined and John has to learn patience with her frustration.
Jo has to learn to accept Bhaer's gentle criticisms of her sensational fiction because she knows his judgment is sounder than her vanity.
Amy has to learn to respect Laurie's genuine emotional depth beneath his charm and Laurie has to learn to take Amy seriously.
None of these adjustments are easy or painless and none of them happen without setbacks and reversals along the way.
What Alcott shows is that the work of adjustment is not a failure of love but its most essential and productive expression.
True love is not about perfection but about growing wiser and kinder together through every difficulty.

Little Women's treatment of love and marriage is distinguished by its refusal to sentimentalize either one of them.
Alcott had observed enough marriages — including her own parents' difficult one — to know that love alone is insufficient.
What transforms love from an initial feeling into a lasting and productive relationship is the willingness to do work.
The work of understanding a person whose background and temperament and needs differ from your own in important ways.
The work of navigating financial constraint, parental exhaustion, creative frustration, and the accumulated weight of years.
The work of choosing, repeatedly and deliberately, to be kind rather than defensive, honest rather than comfortable, present rather than absent.
Alcott shows all four of her sisters eventually in relationships that require this work and are deepened by the requiring of it.
The novel's final argument about love is that it is not a state you achieve but a practice you sustain through difficulty and choice.
True love is not about perfection but about growing wiser and kinder together through every difficulty.