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Aphorisms for Newlyweds
and Others

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is
talked and thought than marriage.
George Bernard Shaw.

The critical period in matrimony is breakfast-time.
                                                     A. P. Herbert

All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should
 learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and
honest -- never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and
constructive, and brings to a marriage the principle of equal
 partnership.
Ann Landers

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads,
hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together
through the years. That is what makes a marriage last --
more than passion or even sex!
                                                          Simone Signoret

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve
one's rights and double one's duties.
Arthur Schopenhauer

It [marriage] resembles a pair of shears, so joined that
they cannot be separated, often moving in opposite
directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes
between them.
                                                            Sydney Smith

Marriage:  The state or condition of a community consisting of
a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
Ambrose Bierce

Rituals are important. Nowadays it's hip not to be married.
I'm not interested in being hip.
                                                                    John Lennon

The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which
the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be
resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a
variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual
spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline
their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.
Margaret Mead

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes
till an entire marriage reconciles them.
                                                                  C. S. Lewis

You're given all these lessons for the unimportant things -- piano-
playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how
to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to
do in normal life. But what about parenthood? Or marriage either,
come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-
approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing,
 compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising
up a new human being.
Anne Tyler

I . . . chose my wife as she did her wedding-gown, not for
a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well.
                                                              Oliver Goldsmith

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage
they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
H. L. Mencken

The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the
individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their
strength -- each asking from the other instead of finding
pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of
gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value,
which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings
joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly
desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being
wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.
                                                          Simone De Beauvoir

The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making
 love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.
Gabriel García Márquez

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still
clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple
divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy,
is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes
into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital
love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indiff-
erence: when we promise to love we really mean that we
promise to honour a contract. Americans, seeming to take
marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love
and sex with too much.
                                                              Anthony Burgess

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy
and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
Carolyn Heilbrun

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of
temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
                                                    George Bernard Shaw

Marriage is the operation by which a woman's vanity and a man's
egotism are extracted without an anaesthetic.
Helen Rowland

Incompatibility:  In matrimony a similarity of tastes, particularly
the taste for domination.
                                                                     Ambrose Bierce

One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is
its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the
happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not
as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible
to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families
and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.
                                                                         Jonathan Raban

Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband's often-
told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and
says "What would I do without you?" is already destroyed.
Germaine Greer

When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn't a sign that they
 "don't understand" one another, but a sign that they have, at last,
begun to.
                                                                         Helen Rowland

Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.
William Shakespeare

Marriages will survive despite enormous strains. A lover will ask,
"Is he happy? Can he still love her?" They don't realise that's not
the point, it's all the normal things they do together- going to the
supermarket, choosing wallpaper, doing things with the children.
                                                                          Carol Clewlow

It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage:
which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.
Friedrich Nietzsche

After marriage, a woman's sight becomes so keen that she can
see right through her husband without looking at him, and a man's
so dull that he can look right through his wife without seeing her.
                                                                          Helen Rowland .

A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and
unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping any-
thing back; there's no deception underneath it all. If I might so
put it, it's an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin.
                                                                         Henrik Ibsen

We here at DownStreet want to extend our congratulations and warmest wishes
to all the newlyweds out there ...
and to all the 'others', too.