Michel de Montaigne was born in 1533 at his family’s chateau near Bordeaux, France. The first child of a wealthy Catholic landowner and a mother of Spanish-Jewish descent, he had an unusual upbringing. While he was permitted to speak French when playing outside with friends or interacting with farmhands, in the home he was allowed to communicate only in Latin until he was six years old (a practice his father believed would greatly enhance the youngster’s mental development). As part of his grooming process, he was roused from his sleep each morning by the soothing sounds of a small chamber music ensemble and, as the day progressed, he was privately tutored in classical literature. Young Montaigne developed a great love of reading, a passion that continued until his death. Not much else is known about his early years, but he did go on to study law and, for a time, practiced law and dabbled in politics.
In 1570, at age thirty-seven, Montaigne stepped away from public life and retired to his family’s chateau. He spent most of his time in a circular tower room—his Solitarium—where he was surrounded by over a thousand books, an astonishing number for the time. Of his special room, he wrote, “I try to keep this corner as a haven against the tempest outside.” And of his treasured library, he wrote, “When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
Montaigne broke new ground in the age-old method of introspection with the invention of a whole new literary genre: the essay. When the first two volumes of his work were published in 1580, they were titled Essais (in English, Essays). Before Montaigne, the word essay meant “to try; to attempt.” The root meaning was “to examine, to put to a test,” similar to the current term assay. After Montaigne, the word took on its modern meaning—a short written composition on a subject, usually presenting the personal view of the author.
When readers discover Montaigne for the first time—as I did when I was in college—they are often delighted to find so modern a thinker in someone writing almost 450 years ago. Montaigne was tolerant in an age of bigotry, curious in a time of dogmatism, and focused on self—a truly modern fixation—in an era when few others would admit to such a thing. And unlike anyone else in his time, he wrote in a loose and free-wheeling way, generously quoting ancient thinkers and meandering off the path with delightful digressions. Aldous Huxley once described his method as “free association, artistically controlled.”
In addition to writing about himself, Montaigne also wrote with wisdom—and often wit—on many other subjects. A classic is his description of marriage:
It may be compared to a cage,
the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out.
When Montaigne’s three-volume collection of essays was translated into English in 1603, it became very popular in London’s literary circles (Shakespeare and Ben Jonson both read it with great interest). A few years later, somewhere between 1609 and 1612, John Webster’s play titled The White Devil featured the following passage, also about marriage:
’Tis just like a summer bird-cage in a garden:
the birds that are without despair to get in, and
the birds that are within despair…for fear they shall never get out.
The wording is so similar to Montaigne’s that it seems indisputable that Webster had plagiarized the thought. He also might have been influenced by a 1602 poem by the English poet John Davies:
Wedlock indeed hath oft compared been
To public feasts, where meet a public rout;
Where they that are without would fain go in,
And they that are within would fain go out.
Throughout history, a wide variety of marital metaphors have been advanced. In his 1693 play The Old Bachelor, English playwright William Congreve found an analogy between marriage and the theater:
Courtship to marriage,
as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.
A prologue, of course, is an introduction to a literary work. From ancient Greece to the eighteenth century, prologues were commonly used to introduce characters and set the stage for poems as well as plays. Prologues went out of fashion in the nineteenth century and are now rarely seen. But to seventeenth-century theater-goers, the point of Congreve’s analogy was clear—compared with the drama of courtship, marriage is boring. A 1714 poem by Alexander Pope changed the metaphor but made the same point:
They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.
In his 1820 book Lacon, English writer Charles Caleb Colton echoes the Congreve and Pope sentiments but does so by likening marriage to a meal:
Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.
In Colton’s observation, courtship is analogous to grace, and his argument is that both are often better than what is to come after them. This was history’s first marriage as a meal metaphor, and it may have stimulated two later observations:
Marriage is a meal where the soup is better than the dessert.
Marriage is like a dull meal, with the dessert at the beginning.
One fascinating discovery I made while researching this book was seeing how often a theme can be maintained, even though the metaphor changes:
Marriage is a book in which the first chapter is written in poetry
and the remaining chapters in prose.
The days just prior to marriage
are like a snappy introduction to a tedious book.
Here, the metaphor has been changed to a book, but the message is the same: marriage is good at the beginning and gets worse over time. And in one final example, notice how the same point is made in yet another way in this old German proverb:
Marriage is fever in reverse;
it starts with heat and ends with cold.
While many of the observations so far have portrayed matrimony as dull and boring, many marriages are so quarrelsome and contentious they can hardly be called unexciting. These combative marriages represent another common type of marriage, and they require another type of metaphor—marriage as war. A perfect illustration is an anonymous saying that goes back many generations:
Marriage is the only war
where one sleeps with the enemy.
A more recent example surfaced in pop culture in the early nineties, just after the first Gulf War, when a character on the Murphy Brown television sitcom said:
Marriage is the Scud missile of relationships.
Despite the missile reference, this remark was less about war and more about the quality of marital relationships. And when you recall that many of Iraq’s Scud missiles were complete duds, the implication is clear.
Perhaps the most famous marriage as war metaphor comes from one of history’s most famous writers, Robert Louis Stevenson:
Marriage is like life in this—
that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
Stevenson is best known for adventure novels like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he was also a poet, children’s author, travel writer, and essayist. This observation comes from Virginibus Puerisque, an 1881 collection of essays in which he opined on many subjects, including matrimony. On that topic, he also wrote: “Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes.”
One would normally think that likening marriage to war is a negative thing, but not necessarily. In her 1968 autobiography On Reflection, Helen Hayes wrote:
Marriage is like a war.
There are moments of chivalry and gallantry
that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats,
the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness,
the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it.
But mostly there are the long dull sieges,
the waiting, the terror and boredom.
Women understand this better than men;
they are better able to survive attrition.
Hayes, called the First Lady of the American Theater, had a career that lasted a full eighty years. She made her first stage appearance in 1905, at age five, and her last in 1985, when she played Miss Marple in a made-for-TV adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel. In the 1920s, she was having a miserable time at a New York party when she was approached by Charles MacArthur, a playwright and journalist from Chicago. He gently placed some salted peanuts into her hand and said, “I wish they were emeralds.” She was instantly smitten, and the couple were soon wed. Their marriage saw deep personal fulfillment, great professional success, and a fair amount of tragedy, including the death of their only daughter to polio. By all accounts, the couple had a legendary love affair, and they remained married until his death in 1956.
Of all human institutions, marriage has been one of the most maligned, and many of the characterizations have been metaphorical. Some are centuries old, as when the legendary lover Giacomo Casanova wrote that “Marriage is the tomb of love.” Or when Lord Byron wrote “Though women are angels, yet wedlock’s the devil.” Many more come from recent times:
If variety is the spice of life,
marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.
I always compare marriage to communism.
They’re both institutions that don’t conform to human nature,
so you’re going to end up with lying and hypocrisy.
Marriage can be viewed as the waiting room for death.
While men have generally led the parade against marriage, women have also contributed many memorable observations:
Love-matches are made by people who are content,
for a month of honey, to condemn themselves to a life of vinegar.
Marriage is usually considered the grave, and not the cradle of love.
Conjugality made me think of a three-legged race,
where two people cannot go fast and keep tripping each other
because their two legs are tied together.
But perhaps my favorite female offering comes from the English writer Marie Corelli, a woman who is now barely remembered, even though she was the best-selling female novelist in England at the turn of the twentieth century. Once described as “the Jacqueline Susann of her time,” she wrote melodramatic and highly romanticized novels that were ridiculed by critics but devoured by a fan base that included such elite readers as Queen Victoria and Oscar Wilde. Of the hundreds of thousands of words she penned, the most famous were these:
I never married because there was no need.
I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband.
I have a dog which growls every morning,
a parrot which swears all afternoon,
and a cat that comes home late at night.
So far, we’ve featured observations strictly about marriage. In the rest of the chapter you’ll find analogies, metaphors, and similes on such related topics as husbands and wives, giving birth and raising children, divorce and remarriage, parent-child relationships, and a few other aspects of home and family life.
Marriage, in life, is like a duel in the midst of a battle.
A divorce is like an amputation;
you survive, but there’s less of you.
Wives are young men’s mistresses,
companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.
A bachelor’s life is a fine breakfast,
a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.
That is, young bachelors have it best, but things get worse as they age, when—recalling the prior Bacon quote—they have nobody to nurse them.
Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse.
Baer was a popular sports writer and humorist in the first half of the twentieth century. When Milton Berle needed fresh material, he would take Baer to lunch at Toots Shor’s to pick his brain. Baer likely inspired a famous Berle quip: “Alimony is like putting gas into another guy’s car.”
When you’re the only pea in the pod
your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.
Marriage must constantly fight against
a monster which devours everything: routine.
This comes from Balzac’s 1829 The Physiology of Marriage, where he also wrote, “The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.”
Divorce is the psychological equivalent
of a triple coronary by-pass.
In a happy marriage,
it is the wife who provides the climate,
the husband the landscape.
The best of all possible marriages is a seesaw
in which first one, then the other partner is dominant.
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
Chesterton viewed the adventure with good humor, once writing: “Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.”
A child, like your stomach, doesn’t need all you can afford to give it.
Marriage is like a bank account.
You put it in, you take it out, you lose interest.
Raising children is like baking bread;
it has to be a slow process or
you end up with an overdone crust and an underdone interior
Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty
and women their happiness.
Madame de Rieux was a sixteenth-century French noblewoman and writer. Her point is that marriage is a gamble for both men and women, but they risk different things. A century later, Ben Jonson picked up the theme in A Tale of a Tub (1692): “I smile to think how like a lottery these weddings are.”
Marriage is to courting as humming is to singing.
De Vries also wrote: “The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds—they mature slowly.”
I…have another cup of coffee with my mother.
We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.
In Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), the character Pearl also describes a complicated mother-daughter relationship: “Whenever I’m with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.”
Remarrying a husband you’ve divorced
is like having your appendix put back in.
Comedian Larry Miller put it this way: “I don’t understand couples who break up and get back together, especially couples who divorce and remarry. That’s like pouring milk on a bowl of cereal, tasting it, and saying, ‘This milk is sour. Well, I’ll put it back in the refrigerator; maybe it will be okay tomorrow.’”
The chains of marriage are so heavy
that it takes two to bear them, sometimes three.
This is one of history’s most famous justifications for a mistress. It comes from the son of a very famous father, Alexandre Dumas père, the author of The Three Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo. In France, instead of using Sr. and Jr., père and fils are used (from the Latin; pater, for “father” and filius, for “son”).
The father is always a Republican to his son,
and his mother’s always a Democrat.
Husbands are like fires.
They go out when unattended.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
Children are like wet cement.
Whatever falls on them makes an impression.
Ginott, an Israeli with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, burst on the cultural scene in 1965 with Between Parent and Child, a book on parenting that remained on the best-seller list for more than a year.
When a woman gets married,
it’s like jumping into a hole in the ice in the middle of winter;
you do it once and you remember it the rest of your days.
Childhood is a short season.
The Wedding March always reminds me
of the music played when soldiers go into battle.
Matrimony, the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented!
The sea of marriage is a popular literary metaphor. In Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), protagonist Newland Archer is looking at a photograph of his betrothed, the innocent and inexperienced May Welland. Just then, his thoughts turn to the exciting and unconventional Countess Ellen Olenska. He feels unsettled. Wharton writes: “The young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland’s familiar features; and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.”
Marriage is a psychological condition, not a civil contract and a license.
Once a marriage is dead, it is dead,
and it begins to stink even faster than a dead fish.
The concept of two people living together for twenty-five years without a
serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.
We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe.
A man who marries a woman to educate her falls victim to the same fallacy
as the woman who marries a man to reform him.
Wedlock is like wine—not properly judged of till the second glass.
There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage
just like the rhythm of a courtship—only backward.
You try to start again but get into blaming over and over.
Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless.
Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses.
The death occurred much earlier.
Marrying a man is like buying something
you’ve been admiring for a long time in a shop window.
You may love it when you get it home,
but it doesn’t always go with everything else in the house.
Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck.
If you live through it,
you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left.
At every step the child should be allowed
to meet the real experience of life;
the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.
I personally am inclined to approach housework
the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases
which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.
Marriage is very difficult.
Marriage is like a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, all sky.
Marriage is not a reform school.
Having a baby is like trying to push a grand piano through a transom.
This may be the most famous simile on the subject of birthing (a similar version has also been attributed to Fanny Brice). Another popular one, from Carol Burnett, goes this way: “Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.”
A man’s home may seem to be his castle on the outside;
inside it is more often his nursery.
American women expect to find in their husbands
the perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.
After the chills and fever of love, how nice is the 98.6º of marriage!
Marrying is like enlisting in a war or being sentenced to a form of
penal servitude that makes the average American husband into a slave.
More recently, actor James Garner reflected, “Marriage is a lot like the army; everyone complains, but you’d be surprised at the large number that re-enlist.”
If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse—as a man shoots himself.
Mencken was one of history’s great misogamists (marriage haters). He once wrote, “Whenever a husband and a wife begin to discuss their marriage, they are giving evidence at a coroner’s inquest.” In 1930, he married Sara Haardt, a college professor eighteen years his junior. Given his well-known views, the marriage made headlines. Always ready with a quip, Mencken wrote: “Getting married, like getting hanged, is a great deal less dreadful than it has been made out.” Mencken finally found love, but sadly, it was not to last. His wife died of meningitis five years later.
Children are messengers to us from a world we once deeply knew.
The American educator Neil Postman offered a similar thought: “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”
Today, while the titular head of the family may still be the father,
everyone knows that he is little more than chairman,
at most, of the entertainment committee.
People commonly educate their children as they build their houses,
according to some plan they think beautiful, without considering
whether it is suited to the purposes for which they are designed.
Marriage is based on the theory that
when a man discovers a particular brand of beer exactly to his taste
he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery.
Anybody can have one kid. But going from one kid to two
is like going from owning a dog to running a zoo.
Quarrels are the dowry which married folk bring one another.
A dowry is money or personal property brought to a marriage, often in a chest or piece of baggage. This observation from Ovid’s The Art of Love (first century B.C.) may be history’s first metaphor on bringing “emotional baggage” to a marriage. Harriet Lerner said it in another way in The Dance of Anger (1985): “Underground issues from one relationship or context invariably fuel our fires in another.”
Getting married is a lot like getting into a tub of hot water.
After you get used to it, it ain’t so hot.
Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
Alcoholism isn’t a spectator sport. Eventually the whole family gets to play.
Marriage: a souvenir of love.
A souvenir is a memento of something in the past, so this is a variation on the theme of marriage being the death of love. It comes from Reflections of a Bachelor Girl (1909), which also contains this simile: “Marriage is like twirling a baton, turning a hand spring, or eating with chopsticks; it looks so easy until you try it.”
A husband is what is left of a lover,
after the nerve has been extracted.
A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere
is like a cat that goes on playing with a mouse long after she’s killed it.
A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.
Parents teach in the toughest school in the world—
The School for Making People.
You are the board of education, the principal, the classroom teacher,
and the janitor.
Marriage is like pantyhose. It all depends on what you put into it.
Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.
Men are April when they woo, December when they wed:
maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.
Combining a calendar and a weather metaphor, Shakespeare describes the changes from courtship to marriage—fresh male fervor begins to cool, and the sunny disposition of women is quickly replaced by cloudy and rainy days. Another popular calendar metaphor is the May-December marriage, commonly used to describe an age disparate couple, generally one in which the wife is in the spring of her life and the husband in the winter of his.
A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage
just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.
Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us
than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
Chains do not hold a marriage together.
It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads,
which sew people together through the years.
To the family—that dear octopus from whose tentacles
we never quite escape nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.
This is from Smith’s 1938 play Dear Octopus, in which the character Nicholas delivers this toast at the golden wedding anniversary of his grandparents.
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.
Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.
In automobile terms, the child supplies the power
but the parents have to do the steering.
A good many men still like to think of their wives
as they do of their religion, neglected but always there.
The matter between husband and wife
stands much the same as it does between two cocks in the same yard.
The conqueror once is generally the conqueror for ever after.
The prestige of victory is everything.
In Myra Breckinridge, Gore Vidal described it this way: “That long wrangling for supremacy which is called marriage.”
Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.
Take it from me, marriage is not a word…it’s a sentence!
This is exceptional wordplay—at one level, a simple remark about words and sentences and, at another, a marriage is a prison metaphor. The line comes from Vidor’s 1928 silent film classic The Crowd. It is delivered by the main character, John Sims, who angrily says it to his wife as he storms out the door.
Every marriage is a battle
between two families struggling to reproduce themselves.
It is a well-established psychoanalytic notion that six people are present in every bedroom: the couple and both sets of parents. Here, a pioneering figure in the field of family therapy extends the thought by suggesting that, in every marriage, two family traditions war with each other in a battle for survival.
Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin;
but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.
Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she’s a householder.
Marriage isn’t a process of prolonging the life of love,
but of mummifying the corpse.