Marriage Quote by George Jean Nathan

Nathan’s line lands like a martini-dry slap: marriage, in this view, isn’t romance fulfilled but romance revised downward. The “first sweetheart” isn’t a person so much as a private myth - the original imprint of desire, purified by distance and nostalgia. Calling her an “illusion” is the dagger twist. He’s not just mocking youthful love; he’s indicting the male habit of turning early longing into a permanent standard no real partner can meet. The wife becomes “compromise,” a settlement with reality after the intoxicating lie of first passion has done its damage.

The intent is less marital advice than cultural provocation. Nathan, a cutting early 20th-century American critic and editor, wrote from a milieu that treated bourgeois marriage as both social necessity and comic tragedy. His era’s public morality prized domestic stability while its urbane intelligentsia made sport of it. The sentence performs that sport with surgical efficiency: it reduces a grand institution to a psychological bargain, and it makes the bargain feel faintly pathetic.

Subtext: this is a male-centered anthropology, and that’s part of its bite. Women appear as roles in a man’s narrative - “sweetheart” as fantasy, “wife” as concession - which mirrors the very emotional immaturity he’s skewering. The cynicism works because it names a recognizable dynamic: how nostalgia can sabotage intimacy, and how “settling down” can mask the refusal to relinquish an idealized past.