Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge takes a scalpel to romance and finds a hall of mirrors: male desire points outward, toward a woman as object; female desire, he argues, is forced inward, toward being desired. It’s an unromantic thought delivered with the cool assurance of someone who’s watched courtship turn into choreography. The line works because it’s built on asymmetry. The first clause sounds like a timeless truism, almost tender in its simplicity. The second clause snaps it into critique, suggesting that what passes for women’s “preference” is often a response to men’s appetite, not an appetite allowed to stand on its own.

The subtext isn’t just about sex. It’s about power and social legibility: in a culture where women’s security, reputation, and even survival are tethered to men’s approval, desire gets rerouted. To want a man directly can look like transgression; to want his wanting looks like virtue. Coleridge is diagnosing a feedback loop where male desire sets the terms of the game and female desire becomes a strategy for navigating it.

Context matters: Romantic-era Britain draped passion in poetry while keeping women hemmed in by marriage markets, inheritance laws, and strict codes of propriety. Coleridge, chronicling the era’s obsession with feeling, also sees how “feeling” can be staged. The bite in the sentence is its insinuation that heterosexual romance, as socially organized, manufactures women’s desire as a performance - a cultivated receptivity - and then mistakes that performance for nature.