Love & Passion Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Marriage, in Maugham's hands, lands as a practical joke played on respectability. The line starts with the socially approved reason - "to have a home" - then swerves into a confession so blunt it sounds like heresy: a man marries not for passion but to stop having to deal with it. The comic engine is that pivot. "But also" is the trapdoor; it turns domestic aspiration into a kind of bureaucratic solution to desire.

The subtext is pure Maugham: sex is effort, negotiation, complication, risk. Courtship requires performance; affairs require secrecy; even desire itself can be noisy. Marriage, supposedly the sanctifying institution for erotic life, becomes the mechanism for damping it down, routing it into routine or delegating it to the comforts of propriety. "Bothered" is doing a lot of work here, shrinking libido from romantic destiny to an inconvenience like paperwork. "And all that sort of thing" is the final flick of the wrist: an airy dismissal that implies whole worlds of intimacy, betrayal, and shame without naming them.

Context matters. Maugham wrote in a culture that publicly fetishized marital virtue while privately running on hypocrisy, double standards, and discreet arrangements. As a playwright and social observer, he understood how institutions sell themselves as ideals while serving as social technologies: stabilizers, shields, and excuses. The line isn't anti-marriage so much as anti-sentimentality. It's a diagnosis of how people use marriage to manage appetite, not fulfill it - and how easily society applauds the management as moral achievement.