Marriage Quote by Jim Samuels

Marriage, in Jim Samuels's framing, isn’t the lasting bond people sell you; it’s the temporary contract. The punchline lands by flipping the expected hierarchy: “wife” sounds permanent, “ex-wife” sounds like the past tense. Samuels insists the opposite. It’s a dark little bit of realism dressed as a one-liner, the kind of joke that works because it smuggles a warning inside a shrug.

The intent is less to sneer at women than to puncture the romance-industrial myth that marriage is the finish line. His “lasts only for the length of the marriage” is almost bureaucratic, reducing a supposedly sacred relationship to a defined term, like a lease. Then comes the sting: an ex-wife “for the rest of your life.” That’s not just emotional baggage; it’s legal, financial, social, and parental gravity. Even when affection ends, entanglement doesn’t. Names may change, households split, but shared history and paperwork have an afterlife.

The subtext is accountability: choose carefully, because the consequences of choosing badly linger. It also gestures at a modern reality where divorce is common enough to be material for comedy, yet consequential enough to haunt a man’s narrative of freedom. The humor relies on asymmetry: marriage is optional to leave, but the fallout is not optional to keep. The line turns “forever” into an irony, and it’s funny because it’s plausibly true.