Some of us don’t have time for this crap.

It was H.L. Mencken who said “Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?”, which may have something to do with my seemingly eternal unmarriedness. If – as I am – you’re over thirty-something and not married, there are two extreme poles that you may have gravitated toward. On the one hand, you may be forlorn and fill your evenings scouring Facebook for lost loves, and Match.com for new ones. On the other, you may be self-deluded into an ecstatic sort of glee with the freedoms you have, taking an irrational pride in your golf swing or bitchin’ pilates skills while you chuckle smugly at your grumpy married friends. I don’t meet too many people in between. Which seems to be one of the sad side effects of marriage in western culture. Thanks to decades of Disney and family television, many of us dream of a magical world in which you find romance and stability in the same partner, and in a very consumer-like fashion are eventually disappointed and return the product for a refund. But the fact is that our narrow perception of what marriage means is just that – a narrow perception. This Psychology today piece tidily rounds up the history of marriage in the west, and if you put the pieces together, it paints a pretty amusing picture wherein the wealthy historically got married for completely unromantic reasons and had all the real fun on the side, and then convinced the peasantry that marriage was sacred so they didn’t get too rowdy. Thank God we have such amazing technology at our fingertips these days, and may finally escape this con perpetrated for centuries by the ruling class. Yes, Facebook can predict who you’ll be dating next week, and mathematics can tell you when you’ll get divorced. If we can just find an algorithm for making the bit in between more fun, we’ll be all set. Me, I’ll get married if Sandra Bullock ever gets around to asking me, but for now, here are some quotes that sum up a lot of what I think about marriage…

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?
H.L. Mencken

“There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.”
Oscar Wilde

“Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”
Oscar Wilde

“Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn’t they’d be married too.”
H.L. Mencken

“Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed.”
Albert Einstein

“To marry a woman who you love and who loves you is to lay a wager with her as to who will stop loving the other first”
Albert Camus

Vesper Lynd: Am I going to have a problem with you, Mr. Bond?
James Bond: No, don’t worry, you’re not my type.
Vesper Lynd: Smart?
James Bond: Single.

“The only really happy folk are married women and single men.”
H.L. Mencken

“In marriage, it is declared, one is still possessed of reason. The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one’s dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm.”
Joseph Campbell