"Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure"

Byron compresses a psychology of desire and resentment into a balanced antithesis. “Haste” captures the impulsive surge of attraction: the thrill of novelty, projection, and the flattering mirror of romance. “Leisure” signals the long, unhurried hours in which disenchantment is cultivated, small grievances magnified, disappointments rehearsed, narratives rewritten to transform a once-glorified beloved into an object of scorn. The aphorism observes a temporal asymmetry: passion ignites quickly; contempt matures slowly.

It is a jab at masculine courtship, especially in a culture that prized conquest over constancy. The initial sprint, ornamented with vows and dramatics, is a performance; what follows, once novelty wanes, is rumination. Leisure here is not restorative; it is corrosive. Time, unfilled with discipline or empathy, becomes a distillery for resentment.

Read more broadly, the line warns against the illusion that intensity equals depth. A love born of haste often rests on fantasy; when reality asserts itself, the same imagination that inflated virtues now studies defects with meticulous care. Detestation, unlike infatuation, demands the patient work of justification: we gather evidence, recruit witnesses, tell ourselves stories that make leaving feel righteous.

Byron’s social world matters too. Leisure belonged to the privileged, who could afford impulsive entanglements and, later, the luxury of protracted disdain. The aphorism thus exposes a moral economy: power accelerates desire and elongates contempt.

Against this tendency, wisdom reverses the timing. Be slow to idealize; let knowledge precede surrender. And after commitment, be quick to forgive, to interrupt the slow brew of bitterness. If haste cannot be avoided, let leisure be devoted not to detestation but to curiosity, learning the ordinary, untheatrical truth of the other. Love that endures is less a blaze than a craft, practiced deliberately, wary of stories that feel grand because they are brief, and skeptical of despising that feels justified because it was carefully assembled.