By the time you swear you're his, Shivering and sighing. And he vows his passion is, Infinite, undying. Lady make note of this -- One of you is lying.

This stanza is from Dorothy Parker’s short poem “Unfortunate Coincidence,” one of her epigrammatic verse pieces about romance, sexual politics, and the gap between courtship rhetoric and reality. Parker wrote and published such poems during her years as a prominent New York wit and magazine writer, when her work often skewered the sentimental language of love poems and popular songs. Here she adopts a sing-song rhyme and the familiar scene of mutual vows—she “swear[s]” devotion while he swears “infinite, undying” passion—only to puncture it with a cynical punchline addressed directly to “Lady,” as if offering hard-earned advice about heterosexual bargaining and self-deception.

In these clipped, rhymed lines Parker skewers the melodramatic language of courtship. The speaker addresses a “Lady” at the moment romantic vows are exchanged—when she is emotionally swept up (“shivering and sighing”) and he is proclaiming eternal devotion. The punchline—“One of you is lying”—collapses the entire scene into a cynical epigram: either the man’s protestations are insincere, or the woman’s surrender to them is self-deception. The poem’s sing-song meter mimics sentimental verse, but the final line weaponizes that form to expose how conventional romance scripts can mask manipulation, wishful thinking, or mutual performance rather than truth.