Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then.

Mr. Bennet's observation that "next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then" is one of the most quoted expressions of his sardonic domestic philosophy. Uttered to Elizabeth after Jane's hopes of Charles Bingley have collapsed, the remark treats romantic disappointment as a kind of social distinction — something that gives a girl "a sort of distinction among her companions" — rather than as genuine suffering. The line is delivered in Mr. Bennet's characteristic tone of detached amusement, and it immediately follows his dry congratulation of Jane for being "crossed in love," a phrase that reduces her quiet heartbreak to a fashionable accomplishment. Elizabeth's reply — "Thank you, sir, but a less agreeable man would satisfy me" — shows that she already understands the ironic game her father is playing, even as she deflects his suggestion that George Wickham might be the man to "jilt" her creditably.

The Expression as a Touchstone for Self-Knowledge

The phrase "crossed in love" and the idea it encodes become a private measure against which Elizabeth later tests her own emotional honesty. After reading Darcy's letter and undergoing the painful revision of her opinions about both Darcy and Wickham, she cries out, "How despicably I have acted!" and confesses that "vanity, not love, has been my folly." She recognizes that she has been "pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other" — a formulation that directly echoes her father's casual taxonomy of romantic disappointment. Where Mr. Bennet had treated being "crossed in love" as a light, almost enviable state, Elizabeth now understands that her own supposed disappointment over Wickham's defection was never real love at all, but merely wounded vanity. The expression thus marks the distance between her father's cynical detachment and her own hard-won capacity for genuine self-reproach.

The Expression and the Reversal of Pride

The motif of being "crossed in love" also reverberates through Elizabeth's later reflections on her own feelings. When she stands before the portrait of Darcy at Pemberley, she feels "a more gentle sensation towards the original than she had ever felt at the height of their acquaintance," and she remembers his regard "with a deeper sentiment of gratitude." This is the opposite of being "crossed" — she is not nursing a slight but discovering that she has been valued by a man she had misjudged. The expression her father used so lightly now seems inadequate to describe the complexity of what she feels. Later, when she learns of Darcy's role in securing Lydia's marriage, she is overwhelmed by a sense of obligation and admiration that has nothing to do with the petty "crosses" of flirtation. The novel's movement, in fact, carries Elizabeth from the realm of her father's ironic maxims — where love is a game of slight advantages and amusing disappointments — into a world where love demands moral seriousness, self-sacrifice, and the willingness to be humbled.

The Expression and the Final Reconciliation

When Darcy makes his second proposal and Elizabeth accepts him, the language of being "crossed in love" is entirely absent. Instead, Darcy speaks of his "affections and wishes" being "unchanged," and Elizabeth tells him that her "sentiments had undergone so material a change" that she can receive his assurances "with gratitude and pleasure." The playful, ironic framework that Mr. Bennet had supplied for understanding romantic disappointment has been replaced by a vocabulary of genuine transformation. Elizabeth herself, looking back, can joke about having dated her love from "first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley," but the joke is a conscious echo of her earlier, more superficial self — a self that has been educated out of its reliance on wit as a defense against feeling. The expression "crossed in love" thus functions as a kind of thematic bookmark: it marks the beginning of Elizabeth's emotional education, and its obsolescence marks its completion.