Daily Inspiration Quote by Erica Jong

A six-word seesaw that turns romance into a structural problem. Erica Jong’s “Men and women, women and men. It will never work” isn’t a tantrum about dating so much as a deadpan diagnosis of the heterosexual script: the endless swapping of roles, expectations, and resentments that supposedly “balance out” but mostly grind people down. The repetition is the point. By flipping the phrase, Jong stages the relationship as a closed circuit, a loop where each side can only mirror, oppose, or misread the other. No escape hatch, no third language.

The blunt final sentence lands like a punchline, but it’s also a refusal of the self-help optimism that insists compatibility is a matter of better communication. Jong’s novels, especially Fear of Flying, came out of a moment when second-wave feminism was tearing up the old manuals - about marriage, sex, ambition - and discovering that liberation didn’t automatically rewrite desire. “It will never work” carries that post-euphoria hangover: even when the rules change, the emotional muscle memory remains, and so do the power dynamics that make “men” and “women” feel like rival camps instead of shared categories.

Subtextually, the line is less about innate difference than about the exhaustion of binary thinking. Jong compresses the modern romantic impasse into a slogan: as long as we keep treating gender as destiny, relationships become negotiations between stereotypes, not people. The cynicism is strategic - a provocation meant to make the listener argue back, and in arguing, admit how much “working” has always demanded.