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Favorite Trivia – MARRIAGE & DIVORCE
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| “Whatever you may look like, marry a man your own age. As your beauty fades, so will his eyesight.’
Phyllis Diller (That’s Really Funny) |
| “Don Jose and Donna Inez led for some time an unhappy life, wishing each other not divorced, but dead.”
Lord Bryon – Don Juan |
| “My cousin just got married for the totally wrong reasons. She married a man for money. She wasn’t real subtle about it. Instead of calling him her fiancé, she kept calling him her financé.”
Rita Rudner (That’s Really Funny) |
| “Often the difference between a successful marriage and a mediocre one consists of leaving about 3 or 4 things a day unsaid.” |
| “I married a younger man. Five year younger than I am. I figure it like this: If you can’t find a good man, raise one.”
Wanda Sykes-Hall (That’s Really Funny) |
| “I am glad that I am not a man, for then I should have to marry a woman.”
Madame de Staël |
| “In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar—a custom which is still continued.”
Rowland |
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“Diana [Princess Di] claimed to Morton that it was her husband’s obvious disappointment that she had given birth to a second boy, rather than the girl that he wanted, that plunged their marriage deeper into crisis. ‘He’s even got red hair!’ Charles is said by Diana to have cried in a hurtful voice of alarm when Harry emerged after nine hours of labor . . .’ The Windsors had had an uncanny knack of producing first a boy then a girl. Dianna was so reluctant to be different that, even though she knew after her amniocentesis test in 1984 that she was carrying a boy, she had failed to share that information with her husband.” Tina Brown – The Diana Chronicles |
| “Mum used to say the secret of any successful marriage is continuing to laugh at your husband’s jokes. When wives stop laughing, husbands get new wives, not new jokes.”
Tina Brown – The Vanity Fair Diaries |
| “Married this day at 10.15 to John Walter Cross, at St. George’s, Hanover Square. . . We went back to the Priory, where we signed our wills. Then we started for Dover, and arrived there a little after 5 o’clock.” [May 6, 1880]
The Journals of George Eliot, ed. by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston |
| “Two men are talking. One says to the other, ‘I haven’t spoken to my wife for 15 years.’ ‘Why’s that?’ asks the second. ‘I don’t like to interrupt,’ says the first.” |
| “Wendy’s sister married so well that she could afford to put a private detective on her bridegroom’s trail the morning of their honeymoon and when, six months later, her husband at last committed an indiscretion, she cleaned up. She even got a house with a lavender pool.”
Eve Babitz – Eve’s Hollywood |
| “I know a guy that every time he gets feeling low he goes back to his wife. Makes him appreciate what he had. He goes away again and feels just fine.”
John Steinbeck – Sweet Thursday |
| “I don’t think this is a marriage so much as a book deal for Melania,” a publishing executive said in explaining why she hasn’t moved out. “The longer she stays with him [Trump], the higher the price for a tell-all.” |
| “When she [Daisy Decazes de Broglie Fellowes] was twenty and a bit more presentable, she married the Prince de Broglie. In memoirs, he is usually described by a single anecdote: soon after his wedding day, he took up with his chauffeur.” Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins – The Power of Style |
| “A man gets home early from work and finds his wife in bed with his best friend. “‘Right! That’s it!’ he says pulling out a gun and pointing it to his own head. At this point his wife starts laughing hysterically. “‘I don’t know what you’re laughing for,’ says the man. ‘You’re next!'” |
| “Rich men and their wives are soon parted. Matrimony plus money has a way of developing into alimony.”
Rowland |
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“I must always have my fingers in the world’s pie and be doing as well as talking; creating, as well as analyzing. It is so true what you said about the relief of engaged girls. I am too weary of wasting time to run around to parties any more for ‘opportunity’; I have a greater faith that if I work and write now, I will have a rich, inner life which will make me worth fine, intelligent men . . . rather than only an empty hectic fear of being alone. I believe one has to be able to live alone creatively before being ready to live with anyone else. I do hope someday I meet a stimulating, intelligent man with whom I can create a good life, because I am definitely not meant for a single life.” [January 29, 1956]
Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
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“When you marry your mistress, you create a vacancy.” Jimmy Goldsmith |
| “Busy: The husband who is as busy as a bee may wake up to find that someone else has his honey.”
Evan Esar – Esar’s Comic Dictionary |
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Amy Spencer: “You and your wife, Sue, met on the set of the 1975 movie Rancho Deluxe. What has made you such good partners for all these years?”
Jeff Bridges: “I’m so blessed. We’re going on 45 years now, and it’s getting better and better! We coulda gotten divorced many times, for many reasons. We just didn’t. And we used that to hone our intimacy. Because our primal fight is, ‘You don’t get it. You don’t understand what it’s like living with you. You do this and that . . . you just don’t get it.’ And it’s accurate! But we both feel that. And we can use every bump to widen our love basket. And it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and more precious.” Parade Magazine, June 12, 2022
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| “Yearn: Before marriage a man yearns for a woman; after marriage the y is silent.”
Evan Esar – Esar’s Comic Dictionary |
 “It isn’t tying himself to one woman that a man dreads when he thinks of marrying; it’s separating himself from all the others.”
Rowland |
| “What’s the punishment for bigamy? Two mothers-in-law.” |
| “Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same.”
New Women |
| “Of all men, Adam was the happiest; he had no mother-in-law.”
Parfait |
| “Ask: Many men would do less lying if their wives didn’t ask so many questions.”
Evan Esar – Esar’s Comic Dictionary |
| “Marriage should combat without respite or mercy that monster that devours everything—habit.”
Balzac |
| “Second husband: Most men would rather be the second husband of a widow than the first.”
Evan Esar – Esar’s Comic Dictionary |
| “Sometimes men like to hear about a woman’s past love affairs, but it’s better for a woman not to take a chance and tell. Unless she is truly in love and wishes to belong to the man entirely—and doesn’t mind a long spell of hollering.”
Marilyn Monroe (with Ben Hecht) – My Story |
| When Kevin Bacon is asked about his 31-year, 2-kid marriage to Kyra Sedgwick, Kevin responds, “Whenever people ask us how we’ve stayed married, I’ve started saying, ‘Keep the fights clean and the sex dirty.'”
AARP Magazine, April/May, 2020 |
| “I look at Michael and breathe a huge sigh of relief. I would choose him again this second . . . the way he finds the things I’ve lost—keys, my cardigan—and then returns them to me as gifts, all wrapped up in fancy paper and ribbons.”
Catherine Newman – “I Do. Not.” (The Bitch in the House – Cathi Hanauer, ed.) |
| “When you see what some girls marry, you realize how they must hate to work for a living.”
Rowland |
| “‘Who’s poor sancho?’ I ask Jesús…. ‘sancho refers to a pet,’ he said . . . ‘around here, we have a problem. The husband leaves, and sometimes a neighbor man moves in—with the man’s wife, you see? Then he becomes sancho, because he’s kept, he’s looked after, he’s her pet. We call him sancho . . . “‘We act as though it’s funny,” said a man at the bar, ‘but when you sanchear someone around here—make him a cuckold—it’s very serious. Why, just up the river in Escanelilla, a man left for Florida and his wife had twins by a sancho who moved in. When she heard he was coming home, she got so scared she drowned both babies. Of course, she went to jail. But then the husband came home and found out anyway. Since he couldn’t kill his wife, he killed the sancho. Who could blame him? Now both husband and wife are in jail.’“The others standing around shook their heads. Being cuckolded, in Mexico, was very serious business. The longer I stayed in Ahuacatlán the more I realized it was perhaps married men’s greatest fear upon leaving for the States.”
Ted Conover – Coyotes: A Journey through the Secret World of America’s Illegal Aliens |
| “I, unfortunately, was not a faithful husband. I was always encountering women too desirable to resist.”
Diego Rivera |
| Levinson’s Law No 6: “In choosing a wife, visualize how she would look if she weren’t a blonde.”
Leonard Louis Levinson – Webster’s Unafraid Dictionary: Defiant Definitive Put-Downs |
| “He didn’t have trouble committing . . . adultery. He was very unfaithful. He was cheating on me with his secretary. I’d find lipstick on his collar covered with Wite Out.”
Wendy Liebman (That’s Really Funny) |
| “It does help to hear that his behavior, which can be so draining, is because of the Alzheimer’s. We have had a good marriage over the years. I never dreamed I would have to spend so much time reassuring him of that. The greatest pain is that he doesn’t remember so many of those special times. It is like losing a part of your history.”
“Lessons Learned: Shared Experience In Coping” (Thomas DeBaggio – Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer’s) |
| “When he was asked if he agreed with marriage, he said yes but it didn’t agree with him.”
Winchester |
| “People are meant to live two-by-two in this world. ‘Taint natural to be lonesome.” [Mrs. Gibbs]
Thornton Wilder – Our Town |
| “George, I was remembering the other night the advice my father gave me when I got married. Yes, he said: ‘Charles,’ he said: ‘start right off showin’ who’s boss. Best thing to do is to give an order about something, even if it don’t make sense, just so she’ll obey,’ he said. Then he said: ‘If anything about her irritates you, her conversation or anything, get right up and leave the house; that’ll make it clear to her.’ And, oh, yes, he said: ‘Never let your wife know about how much money you have, never.'” [Mr. Webb]
Thornton Wilder – Our Town |
