Prison and Disillusion: Male
Complaints about Marriage
There is a contradiction between the presumption that
men massively raped and oppressed women for millennia
and the things that so many men say about marriage, and
the prison and disillusion that they associate with this
same marriage. See some of these mourning:
They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.
Alexander Pope, 1688-1744, English writer,
Translations from Chaucer
A second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience
Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784, in James Boswell Life of
Samuel Johnson
Marriage is nothing but a civil contract.
John Selden, 1584-1654, English historian, Table Talk
Courtship to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a
very dull play.
William Congreve, 1670-1729, English writer, The old
bachelor
Ay, ay, I have experience: I have a wife, and so forth.
William Congreve, 1670-1729, English writer, The Way
of the World
The most happy marriage I can imagine to myself would be
the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.
Samuel Coleridge, 1772-1834, in Thomas Allsop
Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S.
Coleridge
Love and marriage rarely can combine,
Although they both are born in the same clime:
Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine –
A sad, sour, sober beverage – by time
Is sharpened from its high celestial flavour,
Down to a very homely household savour.
All tragedies are finished by a death,
All comedies are ended by a marriage;
The future state of both are left to faith.
Lord Byron, 1788-1824, English poet, Don Juan
What’s behind those lamentations? Merely prosy talk? The
very fact that marriage prevents men from courting other
women freely, as the more cynical feminist could vindicate?
Or just the fact that men have never been so dominant, such
discretionary masters of their women, as we usually say? The
personalities of many women and their cunning might have
diminished male domination a lot more times then we think.
It doesn't explaining all, but can explain a lot.
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