Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden takes a scalpel to the sentimental story we like to tell about intimacy: that relationships are purified by love, loyalty, or fate. He swaps that script for the language of markets and extraction, insisting that most bonds start as transactions and keep going only as long as the exchange stays profitable. The sting is in his phrasing. “Almost all” is both sweeping and carefully hedged, a poet’s way of sounding ruthless while leaving a small, stubborn margin for grace. “Mutual exploitation” lands harder than “mutual benefit,” because it refuses to flatter either side. No one gets to play the victim; everyone is implicated.

The subtext isn’t that affection is fake. It’s that affection is rarely free. We trade attention for status, care for security, laughter for belonging; even tenderness can carry an invoice, often unspoken. By calling it “mental or physical barter,” Auden widens the indictment beyond sex or money into the daily economy of validation, usefulness, and need. His bleakest move comes last: relationships “terminated” when parties “run out of goods.” That’s not just cynicism; it’s a diagnosis of how modern life disciplines feeling into scarcity. When we’re depleted - time, youth, energy, novelty - the bond gets audited.

Context matters: Auden, writing in the shadow of war, mass politics, and disillusioned modernism, had reason to distrust grand moral narratives. His line reads like a cold-weather truth from a century that watched ideals become slogans. The brilliance is how he makes the romance plot sound like a contract, then dares you to argue with your own history.