"What makes men indifferent to their wives is that they can see them when they please"
About this Quote
Desire, Ovid suggests, is less a moral achievement than a scheduling problem. If you can see your wife whenever you want, the romance leaks out through sheer availability. It is a line that sounds like a glib complaint until you notice the colder mechanics underneath: indifference isn’t portrayed as cruelty or incompatibility, but as the predictable outcome of access. Want is fueled by absence; constant proximity turns a person into furniture.
As a poet of Augustan Rome, Ovid is writing from a culture where marriage was often civic architecture rather than a love match, and where elite men were socially permitted - even expected - to seek novelty elsewhere. The line’s intent is not to mourn this arrangement; it’s to anatomize it, almost cheerfully, as if giving advice about weather patterns. That clinical tone is the trick. By framing emotional neglect as a natural consequence of “when they please,” he smuggles in a critique of entitlement: the wife becomes something consumable on demand, and anything consumable loses its thrill.
The subtext is also defensive. If indifference is caused by over-familiarity, then the husband isn’t to blame; the institution is. Ovid, master of erotic strategy, knows how to convert cynicism into instruction. The barb lands because it’s uncomfortably recognizable: the modern myth of “keeping the spark alive” still leans on the same anxiety that availability kills appetite, and that commitment, without chosen attentiveness, decays into taking someone for granted.
As a poet of Augustan Rome, Ovid is writing from a culture where marriage was often civic architecture rather than a love match, and where elite men were socially permitted - even expected - to seek novelty elsewhere. The line’s intent is not to mourn this arrangement; it’s to anatomize it, almost cheerfully, as if giving advice about weather patterns. That clinical tone is the trick. By framing emotional neglect as a natural consequence of “when they please,” he smuggles in a critique of entitlement: the wife becomes something consumable on demand, and anything consumable loses its thrill.
The subtext is also defensive. If indifference is caused by over-familiarity, then the husband isn’t to blame; the institution is. Ovid, master of erotic strategy, knows how to convert cynicism into instruction. The barb lands because it’s uncomfortably recognizable: the modern myth of “keeping the spark alive” still leans on the same anxiety that availability kills appetite, and that commitment, without chosen attentiveness, decays into taking someone for granted.
Quote Details
| Topic | Husband & Wife |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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