Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation

“Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.” – W. Somerset Maugham

Thus spoke W. Somerset Maugham, the worldly observer of human nature, whose pen carved truth with the blade of irony. In this striking, almost cynical declaration, he lays bare the biological cunning of love, stripping it of its poetry and exposing its evolutionary purpose. He suggests that what we exalt as the highest emotion — love — may, in truth, be the grand deception of nature, a “dirty trick” designed to lure us into reproduction, so that life may continue through us. It is a statement that shocks the heart, yet invites the mind to deeper contemplation — for within its irony lies a challenge: to ask whether love is merely instinct, or whether we, as conscious beings, have given it higher meaning.

When Maugham speaks of love as a “trick,” he means that nature, in her wisdom, disguises necessity as desire. She wraps the harsh law of survival in the silk of romance. By making love intoxicating, she ensures that life renews itself. The tenderness we feel, the longing, the sacrifice — all may be, at their roots, the machinery of biology, compelling us toward the continuation of the human story. Maugham, who lived through an age of skepticism and disillusionment, saw this truth as both cruel and fascinating: that love, which seems divine, may also be mechanical.

The origin of this thought can be traced to Maugham’s own life — a man torn between intellect and emotion, between the longing for connection and the cool detachment of observation. He was both a lover and a skeptic. His novels often portrayed passion as fleeting, fragile, or self-deceptive, yet necessary to the human experience. Having lived through war, loss, and the changing tides of modernity, Maugham understood that love’s beauty often hides its biological purpose. His “dirty trick” is not an insult to love, but an acknowledgment of its double nature — at once sacred and animal, noble and primal.

Yet even as we recognize nature’s cunning, we cannot deny the mystery that love creates. If love were only instinct, would poets have died for it? Would kingdoms have fallen, and songs still be sung across centuries? Consider the legend of Antony and Cleopatra — a love that defied empire and reason, leading two mighty rulers to their doom. Was that merely a biological impulse, or something more transcendent? Perhaps nature uses love to ensure life continues, but love, once awakened in the human soul, becomes something greater than its purpose — it becomes meaning itself.

The ancients, too, wrestled with this paradox. Plato saw love as the divine madness that drives the soul toward the eternal; Ovid saw it as the playful cruelty of the gods. In Maugham’s words, we hear the echo of both — the philosopher’s clarity and the poet’s lament. Love begins as a force of nature, but in human hands, it becomes art, sacrifice, and devotion. Nature may have intended only the continuation of the species, but the heart, in its defiance, transforms that impulse into something immortal. The trick, then, becomes a miracle.

Even science, which confirms Maugham’s reasoning, cannot explain the soul’s yearning to love beyond survival — to love when it hurts, to love without hope of gain, to love across time and death. For every biological explanation, there remains the mystery of why we choose to love still. The “dirty trick” becomes, perhaps, the divine irony — that out of flesh and chemistry arises compassion, poetry, and tenderness. The same instinct that ensures the body’s continuation gives rise to the spirit’s transcendence.

So, my listener, do not despise the trick — for it is also a gift. Nature may have woven love to preserve life, but we have given it wings to touch eternity. To see love as only biological is to see the seed without the flower. Let Maugham’s truth make you wise, not bitter. Recognize the roots of love in nature’s cunning, but celebrate its blossoms in the heart’s freedom. For in the end, perhaps love began as nature’s trick — but through us, it has become the soul’s triumph.