"The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post"
About this Quote
Shaw’s “perfect love affair” isn’t romance advice so much as a scalpel aimed at romance itself: the less contact, the better the relationship. It’s a joke with teeth, built on the suspicion that intimacy is easiest when the beloved is safely offstage. By relocating love to the mailbox, Shaw turns desire into literature - curated, revised, and controlled. The line flatters the epistolary tradition while quietly admitting its fraudulence: on paper we can be brilliant, tender, and consistent in a way ordinary cohabitation rarely permits.
The subtext is pure Shavian skepticism about sentimentality and performance. A “love affair” conducted by post is a relationship where each party falls in love with an authored version of the other, a persona with time to edit out pettiness, boredom, contradiction. Distance doesn’t just preserve longing; it protects self-image. Shaw, the dramatist, understands that love is often theater, and letters are the perfect stage directions: pauses are intentional, silences become meaningful, and every line gets a second draft.
Context matters: Shaw lived in a period when letters were the dominant long-form medium, and courtship was heavily shaped by social rules and surveillance. The post offered privacy, plausible deniability, and a slow-burn eroticism that could masquerade as decorum. Today it lands as eerily modern - a pre-digital take on texting, DMs, and the appeal of relationships that thrive in the gap between message and reality. The wit is that “perfect” here means frictionless; the critique is that friction is where real love actually lives.
The subtext is pure Shavian skepticism about sentimentality and performance. A “love affair” conducted by post is a relationship where each party falls in love with an authored version of the other, a persona with time to edit out pettiness, boredom, contradiction. Distance doesn’t just preserve longing; it protects self-image. Shaw, the dramatist, understands that love is often theater, and letters are the perfect stage directions: pauses are intentional, silences become meaningful, and every line gets a second draft.
Context matters: Shaw lived in a period when letters were the dominant long-form medium, and courtship was heavily shaped by social rules and surveillance. The post offered privacy, plausible deniability, and a slow-burn eroticism that could masquerade as decorum. Today it lands as eerily modern - a pre-digital take on texting, DMs, and the appeal of relationships that thrive in the gap between message and reality. The wit is that “perfect” here means frictionless; the critique is that friction is where real love actually lives.
Quote Details
| Topic | Long-Distance Relationship |
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