I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like
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It has to constantly move forward or it dies.
And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.
The line never fails to elicit a laugh, no matter how many times the film is viewed. But it also never fails to provoke a thought, cleverly reminding us that relationships which stand still often fail to survive.
Of all human relationships, those between men and women have probably received the most attention—and they have definitely inspired the most memorable observations. One of the most famous is this analogy:
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
The point, of course, is that women don’t need men at all. The saying is usually attributed to Gloria Steinem, and sometimes to lawyer Florynce Kennedy, both of whom used it frequently in the 1970s. The feminist slogan, as it is often called, has always been familiar to baby-boomers, but it was brought to a whole new generation when it showed up in the 1991 U2 song Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World. While Steinem and Kennedy have gone to great lengths to deny authorship, attributions to them continue to the present day. Steinem once even wrote a letter to Time magazine to identify the woman who first said it: an Australian writer, filmmaker, and former politician named Irina Dunn.
As the news of Dunn’s authorship has become better known, a fascinating story about the saying’s provenance has also emerged. While studying English Literature at Sydney University more than thirty years ago, Dunn came across a book by a nineteenth-century freethinker that contained these words:
A man needs god like a fish needs a bicycle.
Dunn was so impressed with the analogy that she felt a slight rewording of it could serve as a perfect counter-argument to women who believed they needed a man to lead a complete life. The first appearance of her version came in the form of graffiti she scrawled on the walls of two women’s restrooms in Sydney—one at a university theater and the other at a popular student drinking establishment. Regarding the slogan’s humble origins, Dunn later told a reporter, “I only wrote it in those two spots, and it spread around the world.” Like the fellow who invented the happy face image in the 1960s, Dunn never copyrighted the saying, so up until now she has been only rarely credited as the author of the line. But her story is a wonderful example of how a well-crafted analogy can take on a life of its own and capture the imagination of millions. A decade or so after her line became a staple of feminist thought, it also inspired a number of clever spin-offs, including this from an unknown American male:
A man needs a woman like a neck needs a pain.
Friendship is another type of human relationship that has proved amenable to metaphorical description. In Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, written in the third century, Diogenes Laertius wrote of the Greek philosopher Aristotle:
To the query, “What is a friend?”
his reply was “A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
Aristotle couldn’t have known it, but around the same time on the other side of the known world, the Chinese sage Mencius said virtually the same thing: “Friendship is one mind in two bodies.” It’s an illustration of the adage that great minds often do think alike, and it’s also evidence that great minds often turn to figurative language when describing life’s most important realities. The Aristotle and Mencius observations are among the most famous words ever written on friendship, but they are hardly the only eloquent words on the topic, or the only metaphorical ones:
A faithful friend is the medicine of life.
APOCRYPHA—Ecclesiasticus 6:16
Friendship is Love without his wings!
LORD BYRON
A friend is, as it were, a second self.
CICERO
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
A friend is a present you give yourself.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
All human beings are caught up in a wide array of relationships, and all of them have been the subject of analogical and metaphorical observations. In the three chapters following this one, we will delve deeper into the subjects of love, marriage & family life, and sex. But in the remainder of this chapter, we will focus our attention on what people have had to say about relationships in general, the nature of friendship, romantic relationships, and the many fascinating things that men and women have said about each other.
Jealousy in romance is like salt in food.
A little can enhance the savor, but too much can spoil the pleasure
and, under certain circumstances, can be life-threatening.
MAYA ANGELOU
This comes from Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993). In a 1922 book, Little Essays of Love and Virtue, British psychologist Havelock Ellis warned couples about “the demon of jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive.”
Wishing to be friends is quick work,
but friendship is a slow-ripening fruit.
ARISTOTLE
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue
as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter,
to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
W. H. AUDEN
A pseudo-friend is the social equivalent of fast food:
a useful creature who can be called upon to deliver
a tasty illusion of friendship without the expense and bother.
RICK BAYAN
Man without woman would be like playing checkers alone.
JOSH BILLINGS (Henry Wheeler Shaw)
It has been said that a pretty face is like a passport.
But it’s not; it’s a visa, and it runs out fast.
JULIE BURCHILL
Don’t smother each other. No one can grow in the shade.
LEO BUSCAGLIA
Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
SAMUEL BUTLER
She understood, as women often do more easily than men,
that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat,
and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.
PETER CAREY
This observation, from Carey’s 1989 novel Oscar and Lucinda, demonstrates that novelists are generally better than social scientists at describing why men and women have trouble communicating.
The heart of another is a dark forest, always,
no matter how close it has been to one’s own.
WILLA CATHER, in The Professor’s House (1925)
A woman is like your shadow—
follow her, she flies; fly from her, she follows.
NICOLAS CHAMFORT
This eighteenth-century observation is also a lovely example of chiasmus, one of my very favorite rhetorical devices (see www.chiasmus.com).
A woman watches her body uneasily,
as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
LEONARD COHEN
It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness
to the mechanisms of friendship.
COLETTE
Colette was the pen name of a Parisian music-hall dancer who became famous for her plays and novels (Gigi, her best-remembered work, was made into a popular 1958 movie starring Leslie Caron). Writing in 1898, African-American writer Frances E. W. Harper penned an equally impressive analogy on the subject: “True politeness is to social life what oil is to machinery, a thing to oil the ruts and grooves of existence.”
The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity,
as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
This is from Colton’s Lacon (1820), where he also wrote: “True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.”
In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male,
vindictiveness of the female.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
Women are like tricks by sleight of hand,
WILLIAM CONGREVE
The male is a domestic animal which,
if treated with firmness and kindness,
can be trained to do most things.
JILLY COOPER
The Emotional Bank Account represents
the quality of the relationship you have with others.
It’s like a financial bank account in that you can
make “deposits,” by proactively doing things that build trust…
or “withdrawals,” by reactively doing things that decrease the level of trust.
STEVEN R. COVEY
This comes from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families (1997), a sequel to the 1990 best-seller, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, where Covey introduced the concept of an emotional bank account. It’s a powerful metaphor and a helpful reminder that we should strive to make more deposits and fewer withdrawals.
The happiest moment in any affair takes place
after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover
and before the maddening personality of either party
has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.
QUENTIN CRISP
The woman who too easily and ardently yielded her devotion
will find that its vitality, like a bright fire, soon consumes itself.
ANTOINE DE RIVAROL
A quarrel between friends, when made up,
adds a new tie to friendship, as experience shows that
the callosity formed round a broken bone makes it stronger than before.
ST. FRANCIS DE SALES
Callosity means “the condition of being callused” and refers to the hardened tissue that develops around a fractured bone as it heals. Wallace Stegner made the same point about broken hearts: “Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
Once a woman has forgiven her man,
she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.
MARLENE DIETRICH
Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.
ISAAC D’ISRAELI
This observation, which is commonly misattributed to Benjamin Disraeli, comes from Curiosities of Literature, a six-volume study of history and literature by one of England’s foremost historians and critics (and also the father of Benjamin Disraeli). Here are two other metaphorical observations on the same subject:
“Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.” Elinor Glyn
“Romance, like alcohol, should be enjoyed, but should not be allowed to become necessary.” Edgar Z. Friedenberg
A woman who has known but one man
is like a person who has heard only one composer.
ISADORA DUNCAN
Relationships are hard. It’s like a full-time job, and we should treat it like one.
If your boyfriend or girlfriend wants to leave you,
they should give you two weeks’ notice.
There should be severance pay, and before they leave you,
they should have to find you a temp.
BOB ETTINGER
A man has every season,
while a woman has only the right to spring.
JANE FONDA
Men are like pay phones.
Some of them take your money. Most of them don’t work,
and when you find one that does, someone else is on it.
CATHERINE FRANCO
A single man has not nearly the value he would have in a state of union.
He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.
KAHLIL GIBRAN
The man who discovers a woman’s weakness
is like the huntsman in the heat of the day who finds a cool spring.
He wallows in it.
JEAN GIRAUDOUX
Caresses, expressions of one sort or another,
are necessary to the life of the affections, as leaves are to the life of a tree.
If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
He was a baked potato—solid…
I was a fancy dessert—mocha chip ice cream.
KATHARINE HEPBURN, comparing herself with Spencer Tracy
A woman…should be like a good suspense movie.
The more left to the imagination, the more excitement there is.
This should be her aim—to create suspense.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon,
but its echo lasts a great deal longer.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
Another spectacular kiss metaphor came in a 1955 observation from Jeanne Bourgeois, the French singer and dancer better known as Mistinguette: “A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point. That’s basic spelling every woman ought to know.”
A man…should keep his friendship in constant repair.
DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact
of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
CARL JUNG
Everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.
JOHN KEATS, on Fanny Brawne, after being spurned
When you get back together with an old boyfriend, it’s pathetic.
It’s like having a garage sale and buying your own stuff back.
LAURA KIGHTLINGER
Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes;
there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.
HENRY KISSINGER
Kissinger may have been inspired by a famous seventeenth-century line from George Savile (Lord Halifax): “Love is a passion that hath friends in the garrison.” In a 1970 Esquire article, Sally Kempton looked at the same phenomenon from the other side of the gender gap: “It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.”
The relation of man to woman is the flowing of two rivers side by side,
sometimes mingling, then separating again, and traveling on.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Absence lessens the minor passions and increases the great ones,
as the wind douses a candle and kindles a fire.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
This was La Rochefoucauld’s attempt to settle the debate between those who believe “absence makes the heart grow fonder” or “out of sight, out of mind.”
Men kick friendship around like a football,
but it doesn’t seem to crack.
Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
Life without a friend is death without a witness.
ROSE MACAULAY
On the wall of our life together hung a gun
waiting to be fired in the final act.
MARY MCCARTHY
McCarthy wrote this about her relationship with Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv in her 1992 book Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–38. Despite the title, the book is less about her intellectual development than about her sexual adventures.
The worldly relations of men and women often form an equation
that cancels out without warning
when some insignificant factor has been added to either side.
WILLIAM MCFEE
If dating is like shopping,
being engaged is like having a guy put you on lay-a-way.
Like saying, “I know I want it.
I just want to delay taking it home as long as possible.”
KRIS MCGAHA
No love, no friendship can cross the path of our destiny
without leaving some mark o
n it forever.
FRANÇOIS MAURIAC
Women’s hearts are like old china, none the worse for a break or two.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
The allurement that women hold out to men
is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors:
they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.
H. L. MENCKEN
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize-fighters shaking hands.
H. L. MENCKEN
Finding a man is like finding a job;
it’s easier to find one when you already have one.
PAIGE MITCHELL
A face is too slight a foundation for happiness.
MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve
that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
G. K. Chesterton, without formally mentioning beauty, said pretty much the same thing: “There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.”
The quarrels of lovers are like summer storms.
Everything is more beautiful when they have passed.
SUZANNE NECKER
There are two things a real man likes—danger and play;
and he likes women because she is
the most dangerous of playthings.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
A home-made friend wears longer than one you buy in the market.
AUSTIN O’MALLEY
Never date a woman you can hear ticking.
MARK PATINKIN
This observation, from a Providence Journal columnist, is one of the best things ever written on one the most popular metaphors of our time: the biological time clock.
A woman is a foreign land,
Of which, though there he settle young,
A man will ne’er quite understand
The customs, politics, and tongue.
COVENTRY PATMORE
Women are like dreams—
they are never the way you would like to have them.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy;
they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.