quotations about marriage
Spend time, talk it out before you get married. And figure it out. Make sure your really big issues you agree on. How you're going to raise your kids. If you're going to have kids. Your religion. All this kind of stuff. What do you think about money? Your morality? All these things. The big shit. Make sure you talk this stuff out, because this is the stuff that counts, not whether or not he picks up his clothes.
PAT BENATAR
interview, The Believer, May 1, 2003
Whatever you may look like, marry a man your own age -- as your beauty fades, so will his eyesight.
PHYLLIS DILLER
attributed, Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women
A successful marriage is the result of falling in love often--with the same person.
CROFT M. PENTZ
The Complete Book of Zingers
Well-married, a man is winged--ill-matched, he is shackled.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
[Marriage] is the merciless revealer, the great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
The Days Before
Marriage is often like Procrustes' famous code of hospitality. Procrustes built a bed for his guests the same way we build a marriage: according to his own expectations. Shorter visitors were stretched to fit; taller folks were surgically shortened. Likewise, your spouse will try to change you into what he or she thinks you should be, just as you have fine-tuning in mind for your partner.... Marriage is the procrustean bed in which we can develop and enhance our psychological and ethical integrity. It can be the cradle of adult development.
DAVID MORRIS SCHNARCH
Passionate Marriage
I think people really marry far too much; it is such a lottery after all.
QUEEN VICTORIA
letter to her daughter, May 3, 1858
A man in love is incomplete until he has married--then he's finished.
ZSA ZSA GABOR
Newsweek, March 28, 1960
The next step was the use of huts and skins and fire,
And women became the property of one man.
So the chaste pleasures of a private Venus
Were first invented and couples had their own children.
It was then that the human race began to soften.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
When a match has equal partners, then I fear not.
AESCHYLUS
Prometheus Bound
Love and fairytales are nice, but marriage is technically a contract, and it's worth reading the fine-print before signing your name.
MAUREEN SHAW
"The Sexist and Racist History of Marriage That No One Talks About", Teen Vogue, November 28, 2017
Marriage, rightly concluded, is an incarnation of love--poetry expressed in action--a sweet embellishment of an otherwise prosaic existence.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Many brief follies--that is what you call love. And your marriage puts an end to many brief follies, with a single long stupidity.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
She is always married too soon, who gets a bad husband, and she is never married too late, who gets a good one.
DANIEL DEFOE
Moll Flanders
There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage.
MARTIN LUTHER
Table Talk
According to a new survey, people who get divorced die early. People who stay married live longer. The difference is they just wish they were dead.
DAVID LETTERMAN
Late Show with David Letterman, January 11, 2012
We could probably date the conception of "modern" marriage at around 1850, with its gestation through the Gilded Age, and its birth about 1920. Not coincidentally, serenading that pregnancy and birth has been a steadily rising chorus of outcries about the death of marriage and the family. By the 1920s every third magazine article seemed to be titled "Will Modern Marriage Survive?" Of course, reports of marriage's death have been greatly exaggerated: even laying aside the peculiar 1950s (which none of "the family" doomsayers foresaw), marriage remains outrageously popular, divorce statistics and all.
E. J. GRAFF
What is Marriage for?
Marriage is not an event. It's a journey. And what I mean by that is you learn from each other every day.
JUDITH HARRIS
Birmingham Times, November 29, 2017
A woman ... all beautiful and accomplished will, while her hand and heart are undisposed of, turn the heads and set the circle in which she moves on fire. Let her marry, and what is the consequence? The madness ceases and all is quiet again. Why? Not because there is any diminution in the charms of the lady, but because there is an end of hope.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Eleanor Parke Custis, January 16, 1795
The key to a successful marriage is picking up your husband's socks.
PIERS MORGAN
Good Morning Britain, November 29, 2017