"It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough"
About this Quote
The polite adage about relationships being a matter of give and take gets turned inside out here. The exchange, Crisp suggests, is rarely equal. Instead of reciprocity, there is a steady drain of energy, patience, and selfhood, followed by a final judgment that even this excessive generosity was insufficient. The line is mordant and comic, but its sting comes from the truth many feel in love, friendship, family, or work: the burden of care often falls unequally, and the person who keeps giving learns that expectations have no floor.
Crisp built his reputation on aphorisms that puncture social myths, and this one aims at the myth of fair dealing within intimate bonds. The supposed balance of give and take gets recast as a script of service, where duty, conformity, and emotional labor are taken for granted. His theatrical image of flopping into the grave highlights the exhaustion produced by unacknowledged effort, while the posthumous rebuke captures how gratitude can be endlessly deferred. It is not only a joke about love; it is a critique of how society rewards those who appease it. For someone like Crisp, a flamboyantly visible queer man in mid-20th-century Britain and later New York, the pressure to give more respectability, more restraint, more explanation was relentless and never enough.
The line also pushes against the comforting fantasy that compromise guarantees harmony. Compromise can conceal power: if one party sets the terms of what counts as enough, then the other learns to surrender not just time and favors, but the right to set limits. Beneath the wit lies an ethics lesson. Care without boundaries curdles into resentment; generosity without recognition becomes self-erasure. Crisp does not advise withdrawal so much as clarity. Call the dynamic by its name. If the partnership asks only for more, it is not a partnership. Reciprocity is not a slogan but a practice, and without it, the ledger of love becomes a demand note payable with a life.
Crisp built his reputation on aphorisms that puncture social myths, and this one aims at the myth of fair dealing within intimate bonds. The supposed balance of give and take gets recast as a script of service, where duty, conformity, and emotional labor are taken for granted. His theatrical image of flopping into the grave highlights the exhaustion produced by unacknowledged effort, while the posthumous rebuke captures how gratitude can be endlessly deferred. It is not only a joke about love; it is a critique of how society rewards those who appease it. For someone like Crisp, a flamboyantly visible queer man in mid-20th-century Britain and later New York, the pressure to give more respectability, more restraint, more explanation was relentless and never enough.
The line also pushes against the comforting fantasy that compromise guarantees harmony. Compromise can conceal power: if one party sets the terms of what counts as enough, then the other learns to surrender not just time and favors, but the right to set limits. Beneath the wit lies an ethics lesson. Care without boundaries curdles into resentment; generosity without recognition becomes self-erasure. Crisp does not advise withdrawal so much as clarity. Call the dynamic by its name. If the partnership asks only for more, it is not a partnership. Reciprocity is not a slogan but a practice, and without it, the ledger of love becomes a demand note payable with a life.
Quote Details
| Topic | Relationship |
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