In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice and Benedick say that lovers are fools, and they want nothing to do with love. Why do you think they say this?

In William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, we find a handful of characters who become entangled in the complexities of romantic love. Beatrice and Benedick are two sides of the same coin-- both think quite highly of themselves and love to use their intellectual wit to assert their social dominance. They find a match in each other, first as a challenge and later as lovers. Because Beatrice and Benedick both feel that love is for fools, and they feel that they themselves are certainly not fools, they wish to distance themselves from romantic love. Indeed, romantic love does often end in someone looking silly or having their heart broken. All of their protesting against romantic love is really a way of establishing their identities as intellectuals who are above that sort of thing. As smart as they may be, they are still human and succumb to their secret feelings for one another.