Love Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde turns heterosexual romance into a tidy duel of egos, then lands the blade with a grin. The line’s mischief is in its asymmetry: men, he suggests, treat love like a frontier myth, chasing the prestige of “first” as if a woman’s heart were an undiscovered country. Women, by contrast, are cast as curators of endings, preferring the security and narrative closure of being the “last romance.” It’s a joke built on Victorian social math, where reputation mattered, experience was coded as either conquest or stain, and marriage was supposed to convert desire into a respectable final chapter.

The intent isn’t to offer a timeless law of gender; it’s to expose how romance gets recruited into status. “First love” flatters masculine vanity because it implies ownership of innocence, the thrill of authorship. “Last romance” flatters feminine power in a world that limited it: if you can’t always choose your freedoms, you can at least choose your permanence. Wilde’s wording is surgical: “want” versus “like.” Men are restless, acquisitive; women are positioned as aesthetic judges of a satisfying finish.

The subtext is also Wilde’s broader skepticism about sincerity. Love, in his work, is rarely pure feeling; it’s performance, leverage, and narrative control. That’s why the line works: it’s not a sentimental aphorism but a social x-ray, showing romance as a competition over who gets to define the story - who begins it, and who gets to close the book.