Life & Wisdom Quote by Jerome K. Jerome

Jerome K. Jerome turns romance into a childhood infection and, with one sly swap, drains love of its Victorian halo. “Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it” works because it treats the grandest of emotions as a mandatory rite of passage: unpleasant, feverish, faintly ridiculous, and ultimately survivable. The comparison is deliberately unpoetic. Measles is common, contagious, and once you’ve had it, you’re supposed to develop immunity. That’s the joke and the bite: what people call destiny is often just biology, timing, and social pressure moving through a population.

The intent isn’t to deny love’s intensity; it’s to puncture the self-mythologizing around it. Jerome’s narrator-voice (in the spirit of his comic essays and Three Men in a Boat sensibility) likes to position human drama as something we perform with overconfidence and then later describe with embarrassed clarity. Love, in this framing, is not a singular soulmate revelation but a predictable episode in the plot of ordinary life - one that hits everyone, makes you act strange, and then passes.

Subtextually, he’s also teasing the era’s marriage-market solemnity. If love is an illness you “have to go through,” then courtship becomes less a sacred journey than a social contagion: friends catch it, families manage it, society expects it. The line’s cynicism is protective, too - a way to laugh at how thoroughly love can hijack your judgment without admitting how vulnerable that makes you. Jerome’s humor isn’t cruel; it’s the kind that keeps sentiment from becoming self-deception.