The best medicine I have found is to love a woman.

The cure you can't force

There's something almost defiant about this statement. In an era obsessed with optimization—meditation apps, supplements, therapy protocols, wellness routines—Watts is pointing to something messier and less controllable: romantic love. Not self-love or loving humanity in the abstract, but the specific, complicated devotion to another person.

What makes this resonate is how it captures something we all sense but rarely admit. When you're genuinely invested in someone else's wellbeing, something shifts inside you. Your petty anxieties lose their grip. You become less trapped in your own head. It's not that love solves your problems—it doesn't—but it reorients you away from the exhausting mirror-gazing that passes for much of modern self-improvement. You're suddenly part of something larger than your own neuroses.

The tricky part is that love isn't a cure you can prescribe to yourself. You can't force it or hack it into existence through discipline. It requires vulnerability, which is precisely what most of us are defending against when we pursue other remedies. Maybe that's the real medicine—not the love itself, but the willingness to need someone enough that you stop running from your own life.