Love Quote by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne isn’t romanticizing love here; he’s exposing it as a curriculum. The “we” is the tell: this isn’t a private feeling bubbling up naturally, but a social project imposed early and relentlessly, especially on girls. From “infancy” onward, everything becomes training for desirability and attachment: instruction, posture, clothing, “grace,” even “learning” is bent into a single aim. The word “frame” does heavy work. It suggests both construction and enclosure: a life built around love and narrowed by it.

What makes the passage sting is its inventory of the mundane. He doesn’t argue abstractly about patriarchy; he points to the everyday mechanisms that do the persuading - nurses, keepers, etiquette, wardrobe, the policing of “behavior.” Montaigne’s rhetorical move is to strip the mystique from “affection” by showing the infrastructure underneath it. Love isn’t just an emotion; it’s an outcome engineered by caretakers and customs, repeated until it feels like nature.

The subtext is skeptical in a way that feels startlingly current: if you aim every “word” toward love, you don’t simply encourage romance - you preempt other possible selves. Ambition, intellectual independence, pleasure not tethered to approval: these become extracurriculars at best. In Montaigne’s 16th-century world, marriage and courtship were central to women’s security and a family’s standing, so the training had real stakes. His critique lands because it recognizes how power hides in tenderness: the warm hands of “nurses” also shape the script.