Explore "The Damnable Ideal" by Oscar Wilde on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Why can't you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on / monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but / when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their / follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that / reason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. / It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, / that love should come to cure us -- else what use is love at all? All / sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save / loveless lives, true Love should pardon. A man's love is like that. It / is wider, larger, more human than a woman's. Women think that they are / making ideals of men. What they are making of us are false idols merely. / You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage to come down, / show you my wounds, tell you my weaknesses. I was afraid that I might / lose your love, as I have lost it now. And so, last night you ruined my / life for me -- yes, ruined it! What this woman asked of me was nothing / compared to what she offered to me. She offered security, peace, / stability. The sin of my youth, that I had thought was buried, rose up / in front of me, hideous, horrible, with its hands at my throat. I could / have killed it for ever, sent it back into its tomb, destroyed its / record, burned the one witness against me. You prevented me. No one but / you, you know it. And now what is there before me but public disgrace, / ruin, terrible shame, the mockery of the world, a lonely dishonoured / life, a lonely dishonoured death, it may be, some day? Let women make no / more ideals of men! let them not put them on alters and bow before them, / or they may ruin other lives as completely as you -- you whom I have so / wildly loved -- have ruined mine! -- _An Ideal Husband_.