One of the interesting similarities between Montaigne, Shakespeare and Tolstoy is that all of them have flashes of romanticism — especially when speaking of youth — but then deeply unhappy descriptions of marriages, both in stories and personal reflections.

Montaigne was often reticent to admit to having any romantic feelings at all. But it’s hard to take his word on this when he brought up the subject so early in his project, in his second essay On Sadness. It’s in this essay where he famously quotes Catullus that a love that can be described burns on a small pyre. He lets out his romantic side seldomly, but memorably — in his Ovid essay How Difficulty Increases Desire. Even late in life he still circles the subject, trying to evade it by declaring himself too old to feel such love anymore. But when he writes about marriage, the tone turns bleak. Marriage becomes a contract, a cage, endured for family, not flame. The essay on Virgil is the most revealing: sex without intimacy, confession without confession, bravado about the penis where tenderness about the heart might have lived. There’s a haunted absence here — passion briefly acknowledged, then hurried away.

Shakespeare has a very different voice, but the pattern is familiar. His sonnets tremble with desire, jealousy, and adoration — purest poetry, unashamed. But his plays rarely let that lyric voice stand. The comedies pretend to end in marriage, but the marriages are hollow, provisional, often jokes at their own expense. The tragedies show what follows when love is bound into law: Othello strangling Desdemona, Lear howling over Cordelia, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth bound together in mutual ruin. The flame of love is undeniable in his verse, but once it hardens into a bond it curdles into suspicion, cruelty, or absurdity. Passion speaks lyrically; marriage staggers into catastrophe.

Tolstoy is starker still. He could describe the rapture of Levin mowing with peasants or Anna’s first kiss with Vronsky on a station platform, but his marriages are nearly all disasters. Family Happiness begins in bliss and ends in estrangement. Anna Karenina makes passion luminous only to set it against the dead weight of legal and social bonds. The Kreutzer Sonata is a howl against sex and marriage alike. Resurrection strips the institution bare, showing it as a mechanism for ownership and hypocrisy. With Tolstoy the romantic flashes are powerful, but the portrait of marriage is consistently nightmarish, more angry than sad.

Across these centuries, the pattern rhymes: sudden moments of lyric passion, followed by the long gray description of the cage. Perhaps this is cultural — a Europe where marriage was contract and duty, not feeling. Perhaps it is personal — three men who could admit passion only briefly before shame, irony, or rage pulled them back. The tones differ: Montaigne uneasy, Shakespeare mocking, Tolstoy furious. But the oscillation is clear: the flame sung, the cage narrated.

There is a popular theory about all three men — that perhaps all of them were gay. Given the different cultural definitions, it would be more accurate to call them queer. For Montaigne, the focus is on La Boétie and the overpouring of emotion in his Friendship essay. For Shakespeare, it is the sonnets, many written to a “fair youth.” For Tolstoy, it is a journal entry that his wife Sonya often harassed him about, where he admitted to sexual attraction to young men.

There is no simple answer to this riddle. What remains is the pattern: passion fleeting, luminous, hard to sustain; marriage durable, heavy, often cruel. Montaigne, Shakespeare, Tolstoy: three voices that, despite their differences, leave us wondering whether love belongs more to the lyric instant than to the lifelong bond.