"Love-making is an art which must be studied"
About this Quote
“Love-making is an art which must be studied” lands like a wink from someone who lived by rehearsal. Novello, a musician and matinee-idol composer, frames intimacy the way he frames performance: not as pure impulse, but as craft. The intent isn’t to drain romance of mystery; it’s to puncture the lazy myth that desire is self-explanatory. If music requires scales, timing, and listening, why wouldn’t sex require the same?
The subtext is quietly modern. “Studied” implies attention, curiosity, and humility: you learn by watching, trying, failing, adjusting. It also smuggles in consent and reciprocity before those words were common currency. An art is made with someone, not done to them. Novello’s line rejects the macho fantasy of the “natural” lover and replaces it with a more generous ideal: competence as care.
Context matters. Novello’s world was steeped in stage glamour and coded private lives; public respectability often demanded emotional choreography. In that milieu, calling love-making an “art” doubles as camouflage and liberation. It dignifies pleasure as cultivated taste, not dirty accident, while also acknowledging how much of intimacy is learned behavior shaped by culture, class, and performance.
The phrase works because it collapses the distance between bedroom and studio. It flatters the reader into becoming an apprentice rather than a judge, and it reframes erotic skill as something earned through listening. That’s a surprisingly ethical proposition, delivered with the lightness of a show tune: practice, don’t posture.
The subtext is quietly modern. “Studied” implies attention, curiosity, and humility: you learn by watching, trying, failing, adjusting. It also smuggles in consent and reciprocity before those words were common currency. An art is made with someone, not done to them. Novello’s line rejects the macho fantasy of the “natural” lover and replaces it with a more generous ideal: competence as care.
Context matters. Novello’s world was steeped in stage glamour and coded private lives; public respectability often demanded emotional choreography. In that milieu, calling love-making an “art” doubles as camouflage and liberation. It dignifies pleasure as cultivated taste, not dirty accident, while also acknowledging how much of intimacy is learned behavior shaped by culture, class, and performance.
The phrase works because it collapses the distance between bedroom and studio. It flatters the reader into becoming an apprentice rather than a judge, and it reframes erotic skill as something earned through listening. That’s a surprisingly ethical proposition, delivered with the lightness of a show tune: practice, don’t posture.
Quote Details
| Topic | Romantic |
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