Marriage Quote by Samuel Butler

Marriage arrives here less like romance than like a legal instrument: it voids prior contracts. Butler’s sting is in the analogy to a will, where “invalidated” is cold, procedural, almost clerical. Friendship isn’t pictured as an emotion but as a set of standing arrangements suddenly rendered unenforceable by a new institution with higher priority. That bureaucratic diction is the joke and the accusation: Victorian society treats a spouse as the sole legitimate claimant on a man’s time, loyalty, and even identity, while friendships become quaint leftovers.

The sharper turn is Butler’s second clause, which refuses the comforting narrative that marriage merely “changes you.” Even if you stay unmarried, your friendships get nullified when your friends wed. He’s describing a social contagion: marriage reorganizes the whole male network, not just the groom. The subtext is envy and grief, yes, but also a critique of how adulthood is policed. Once the ring goes on, the rules of access change. The casual drop-in becomes an appointment; intimacy gets routed through domestic gatekeeping; the wife (and, by extension, the household) becomes the new border control.

As a poet with a satirist’s eye, Butler weaponizes symmetry. The line’s balance mimics the very inevitability it mocks: you can’t opt out, because other people’s conformity reorders your life anyway. It’s not anti-marriage so much as anti-monopoly - a complaint that the era’s social economy allows only one primary bond, and calls everything else “secondary” until it withers.