Love Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line lands like a well-aimed epigram: it flatters the speaker’s taste, insults his luck, and indicts romance itself as a rigged system. The “women I love” are “fickle” not because female desire is inherently unstable, but because the speaker has elevated a certain kind of refusal into proof of worth. He loves the women who won’t stay put; they remain perpetually interesting because they remain perpetually out of reach. The joke’s second blade twists inward: the women who love him are cursed with “infernal constancy,” a phrase that turns devotion into a nuisance, even a kind of harassment. “Infernal” is doing the heavy lifting here, translating what could be a confession of guilt into a performance of irritation.

The subtext is pure Shaw: romantic self-deception dressed up as insight. The speaker is not simply unlucky; he is complicit. He arranges his desires so that love feels like chase, then complains about the physics of pursuit. Shaw’s comic cynicism also pokes at social scripts around courtship and gender: women are framed as either capricious prizes or clinging burdens, with no room for mutuality. That binary is the point - an exaggeration that exposes the ego at the center of “romantic” storytelling.

As a dramatist shaped by Victorian respectability and early 20th-century debates about marriage, Shaw uses the bon mot as social critique. It’s funny because it’s cruel, and it’s cruel because it recognizes how often people treat affection as value and availability as shame.