An Ideal Man

A fascinating dialogue in Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance between three women on the characteristics an ideal man must possess.





Mrs. Allonby: (A woman after my own heart!) The Ideal Man! Oh, the Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says.
Lady Hunstanton: But how could he do both, dear?
Mrs. Allonby: He should never run down other pretty women. That would show he had no taste, or make one suspect that he had too much. No; he should be nice about them all, but say that somehow they don't attract him.
Lady Stutfield: Yes, that is always very, very pleasant to hear about other women.
Mrs. Allonby: If we ask him a question about anything, he should give us an answer all about ourselves. He should invariably praise us for whatever qualities he knows we haven't got. But he should be pitiless, quite pitiless in reproaching us for the virtues that we have never dreamed of possessing. He should never believe we know the use of useful things, that would be unforgivable. But he should shower on us everything we don't want.
Lady Caroline: As far as I can see, he is to do nothing but pay bills and compliments.
Mrs. Allonby: He should persistently compromise us in public, and treat us with absolute respect when we are alone. And yet he should always be ready to have a perfectly terrible scene, whenever we want one, and to become miserable, absolutely miserable, at a moment's notice, and to overwhelm us with just reproaches in less than twenty minutes, and to be positively violent at the end of half an hour, and to leave us forever at a quarter to eight when we have to go and dress for dinner. And when, after that, one has seen him for really the last time, and he has refused to take back the little things he has given one, and promised never to communicate with one again, or to write one any foolish letters, he should be perfectly broken-hearted, and telegraph to one all day long, and send one little notes every half-hour by a private hansom, and dine quite alone at the club, so that everyone should know how unhappy he was. And after a whole dreadful week, during which one has gone about everywhere with one's husband, just to show how absolutely lonely one was, he may be given a third last parting, in the evening, and then, if his conduct has been quite irreproachable, and one has behaved quite badly to him, he should be allowed to admit that he has been entirely in the wrong, and when he was admitted that, it becomes a woman's duty to forgive, and one can do it all over again from the beginning, with variations.



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So gratifying to know that nothing much has changed between 18th century England and now. :P