Such a romantic

*post written sometime when i was on a Jane Austen/Oscar Wilde binge

There was your mistake. There was your error. The error all women commit. 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 true Love should pardon. A man's love is like that. It is wider, larger, more human than a woman's. You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage to come down, show you my wounds, tell you my weaknesses. 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!