Marriage Quote by Mignon McLaughlin

Marriage, McLaughlin suggests, isn’t a single lightning strike you live off forever; it’s a renewable resource you have to keep generating. The line works because it politely detonates the fairy-tale premise that “true love” is a fixed state. Instead, it treats love as a practice with repetitions, relapses, and rewrites. “Falling in love many times” smuggles in the unglamorous truth that you will fall out of it, too - not necessarily through betrayal, but through boredom, stress, grief, kids, money, illness, the daily attrition of familiarity. The subtext is bracing: permanence isn’t romantic; it’s logistical.

As a journalist and aphorist writing in mid-century America, McLaughlin was observing an era that sold domestic stability as a civic virtue while quietly producing plenty of disappointment behind closed doors. Her phrasing keeps one foot in the sentimental tradition (love! marriage!) and the other in modern realism (repeat the work). The genius is in “always with the same person,” which reframes monogamy not as deprivation but as creative constraint. You don’t get a new plot twist by swapping protagonists; you get it by learning to see the same face under new lighting.

It’s also a subtle defense of long-term commitment without sanctimony: a successful marriage isn’t the absence of change, it’s the ability to metabolize it together - to keep choosing, again and again, the person who’s also changing.