Daily Inspiration Quote by Aphra Behn

Behn treats love less like a haloed virtue than a controlled substance: intoxicating in private, diluted in daylight. The line is deliberately transactional - pleasure depends on secrecy - and that bluntness is the point. In Restoration culture, where reputation functioned like currency and surveillance was social sport, visibility could turn affection into evidence. Love, once public, becomes a deposition: fodder for gossip, leverage for rivals, a liability for women whose desires were policed as moral failure.

The subtext is gendered and strategically cynical. For a male lover, exposure might mean embarrassment; for a female lover, it could mean ruin. So secrecy isn’t just titillation, it’s protection. Behn, one of the first Englishwomen to make a living by writing, understood how quickly a woman’s private life was made public property. Her plays often stage the tension between what women feel and what society allows them to admit. This aphorism compresses that tension into a neat blade: the pleasure of love is not only the body, but the power to choose who knows.

It also carries a dramatist’s instinct for audience. Romance becomes less pleasurable when it acquires spectators, because spectators rewrite the plot - turning intimacy into performance, and desire into a role you have to defend. Behn’s wit lands because it’s unsentimental: love doesn’t die from lack of feeling, it dies from too much commentary.