Marriage Quote by Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck smuggles a quiet radicalism into what could sound like domestic reassurance. A "good marriage", in her framing, is not a locked contract or a fixed personality test with rings. Its success metric is motion: change, growth, and the evolving language of love. That last clause matters most. She does not just make room for people to become different; she insists the relationship must develop new ways to translate that difference into care.

Buck came of age between eras, writing across cultures and watching how institutions - family, religion, nation - can turn virtue into rigidity. The line reads like a rebuttal to the marriage-as-stability ideal, the one that treats adulthood as a final form and spouses as custodians of each other's permanence. Her syntax is almost legalistic ("allows for"), as if she's rewriting the terms: the point isn't romance as a constant feeling, but a structure flexible enough to survive the fact that people aren't constant.

The subtext is a critique of possessiveness dressed up as devotion. Many marriages fail not because love evaporates, but because one partner's growth is experienced as betrayal, a new dialect interpreted as disloyalty. Buck offers a different ethic: love as adaptive practice, not a vow to remain intelligible forever.

It's also an author's insight. Novelists know characters either evolve or become caricatures. Buck applies that narrative rule to intimacy: a marriage that forbids revision traps two protagonists in the same scene until resentment becomes the only plot left.