Aging & Wisdom Quote by Mary Wilson Little

Mary Wilson Little’s line lands like a lace-gloved slap: prim, poised, and faintly vicious. She sets up a neat little symmetry - first cigar, first girl - only to break it with a social twist. The cigar punishes the boy’s body; the girl punishes everyone else’s patience. That reversal is the engine of the joke, because it exposes how adolescent “romance” is often less a private awakening than a public performance.

The specific intent is to puncture sentimentality around young love. By pairing a cigar (a prop of manhood, a ritual of trying on adult swagger) with “his first girl,” Little frames courtship as another kind of affectation: a habit learned for display, not intimacy. The sickness is metaphorical but pointed. The boy is not merely infatuated; he’s insufferable. He becomes loud with it, smug with it, newly convinced the world should revolve around his milestone.

The subtext carries a sharper gendered critique. “His first girl” treats the young woman less as a person than as a credential - an accessory in the same category as tobacco. Little’s phrasing mocks that possessive entitlement while also indicting the culture that trains boys to treat both cigar and girlfriend as badges of arrival.

Context matters: Little writes from a world of strict social codes and chaperoned courtship, where adolescent flirtation was visible, regulated, and gossip-fed. The joke isn’t timeless romantic wisdom; it’s a social corrective, reminding the young (and their indulgent elders) that self-dramatizing desire is rarely charming to anyone forced to witness it.