quotations about marriage
Maybe marriages were made in heaven, but we believe in giving the old-fashioned porch-swing some credit.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
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
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
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
You're married, and suddenly you have your own family. There's a nice comfort in that. That part of your life is certain ... You've got your home in that other person.
SCARLETT JOHANSSON
Good Housekeeping, October 2010
Marriage ... has historically been a battlefield, the site of collisions within and between governments and religions over who should regulate it. But marriage has weathered centuries of skirmishes and change. It has evolved from an institution that was imposed on some people and denied to others, to the loving union of companionship, commitment, and caring between equal partners that we think of today.
EVAN WOLFSON
Why Marriage Matters
Possibilities for the success of a marriage are endless. But you have to be willing to search for them.
JASON R. REDMOND
Are You Talking?
That little ditty about love coming first, then marriage, then the baby carriage--it's history. Over the past few decades more and more single people have been having children, and more and more married couples have not been.
BELLA DEPAULO
Singled Out
I've been married eleven times. It would have been twelve, but one of my ex-wives tracked down all the others.
FERN MICHAELS
The Marriage Game
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
When a match has equal partners, then I fear not.
AESCHYLUS
Prometheus Bound
The husband who wants a happy marriage should learn to keep his mouth shut and his checkbook open.
GROUCHO MARX
attributed, Wise Words and Quotes
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
A successful marriage is the result of falling in love often--with the same person.
CROFT M. PENTZ
The Complete Book of Zingers
Marriage may sometimes be compared to a lottery, in which it is better not to have purchased a ticket than to have drawn a blank.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
ELLEN KEY
"The Morality of Woman"
A man in love is incomplete until he has married--then he's finished.
ZSA ZSA GABOR
Newsweek, March 28, 1960
If sex is supposed to be satisfying and anxiety-free once we are safely ensconced in marriage, how come that's when many of us stop wanting it?
DAVID MORRIS SCHNARCH
Passionate Marriage
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?
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