Rock and roll rhetoric: Love the One You’re With

“If you can’t be with the one you love, honey,
Love the one you’re with.”

This is chiasmus, which is essentially a mirroring: with the one you love / love the one you’re with.

It can be simply the words that are mirrored: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

But the excellent Silva Rhetoricae explains this is more correctly “antimetabole” and that chiasmus more broadly is either the repetition of ideas in inverted order, or the repetition of grammatical structures in inverted order. The key is the A B B A pattern.

Thus, Skakespeare’s Othello:

“But O, what damned minutes tells he o’er
Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strong loves.”

which emphasises the ideas: doubts and suspects, and dotes and loves strongly.

There are many examples in political speech (JFK, Churchill), but here’s a more recent one. In February 2023, Volodymyr Zelensky gave a speech to the UK Parliament and said:

“In Britain, the King is an air force pilot. And in Ukraine today, every air force pilot is a king for us”

Back to Stephen Stills, who wrote the song for his 1970 debut solo album. Here’s the original:

From the 1970 album, Stephen Stills.