Love Quote by Edward W. Howe

Romance, Howe suggests, is a small act of fraud committed with the best intentions. The line lands because it flips the usual moral: instead of love ennobling the beloved, it indicts the lover as an optimistic appraiser, overrating the product. It’s a dry, American strain of cynicism - less Wildean sparkle than newsroom shrug - aimed at puncturing Victorian-era pieties about love as clear-eyed virtue.

The specific intent is to satirize courtship as misrecognition. “Better opinion” is doing double duty: it’s admiration, sure, but it’s also a mispricing of character. Howe’s sly move is to make that mispricing a prerequisite, not an occasional error. The clause “than he deserves” smuggles in a universal judgment: most men, most of the time, are coasting on unearned credit. Love becomes a kind of emotional leverage granted to the underqualified.

The subtext has teeth in its gendering. Howe isn’t claiming people fall in love irrationally; he’s framing women as the ones who confer legitimacy, the ones whose belief manufactures male worth. That carries a backhanded compliment (women see possibility) and a patronizing jab (women are sentimental). In the late 19th-century context - when marriage was still a primary economic and social contract - the joke darkens. If women are expected to “choose wisely” under constrained options, the only way to make the system bearable is to inflate the résumé. The punchline is bitter: romance isn’t blind, it’s self-protective fiction.