Life & Wisdom Quote by Ovid

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.