"A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them"
About this Quote
Mencken skewers romance with the same dry scalpel he used on politics: take a sacred cultural story, then expose its mechanics. The line pivots on that loaded contrast between "special tenderness" and "bunch them". The first phrase flatters the reader's self-image: yes, you are capable of reverence, nostalgia, the soft-focus sentiment that turns early love into a private myth. Then Mencken yanks the camera back. "Bunch them" is not just unromantic; it's clerical. It suggests filing, batching, treating people like interchangeable entries once the novelty has worn off.
The intent isn't merely to sneer at commitment. It's to diagnose how memory and ego collaborate. The "first love" survives as an origin story: it gets preserved because it marks the moment you became the kind of person who can say, later, "I have loved". After that, experience stops feeling singular and starts feeling comparative. Lovers become data points, a series, a pattern you can summarize. Mencken is implying that the very sophistication we congratulate ourselves for acquiring is also a dulling agent.
Context matters: Mencken wrote in an early 20th-century America busy modernizing everything, including intimacy. Consumer culture, mass media, and urban life made replacement and repetition feel normal. His cynicism lands because it borrows that modern vocabulary of accumulation and sorting, suggesting that romance, too, gets processed on an assembly line. The joke stings because it’s plausible - and because most of us can recognize the moment tenderness turns into taxonomy.
The intent isn't merely to sneer at commitment. It's to diagnose how memory and ego collaborate. The "first love" survives as an origin story: it gets preserved because it marks the moment you became the kind of person who can say, later, "I have loved". After that, experience stops feeling singular and starts feeling comparative. Lovers become data points, a series, a pattern you can summarize. Mencken is implying that the very sophistication we congratulate ourselves for acquiring is also a dulling agent.
Context matters: Mencken wrote in an early 20th-century America busy modernizing everything, including intimacy. Consumer culture, mass media, and urban life made replacement and repetition feel normal. His cynicism lands because it borrows that modern vocabulary of accumulation and sorting, suggesting that romance, too, gets processed on an assembly line. The joke stings because it’s plausible - and because most of us can recognize the moment tenderness turns into taxonomy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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