Marriage Quote by Anthony Trollope

Victorian marriage here isn’t romance; it’s arithmetic. Trollope frames a husband and wife as missing parts of a single moral and social sum, and the blunt symmetry is the giveaway. By granting the same “not perfect or whole” verdict to men and women, he borrows the language of fairness to sell a system that is anything but. It reads like balance, but it functions like enforcement.

The verb choice does the real work. “Added” turns a person into an increment, a life into an account that only closes when paired off. “Perfect” and “whole” are totalizing words, the kind that make alternatives feel not merely different but defective. Trollope isn’t just describing a custom; he’s tightening the definition of adulthood until it snaps shut around the unmarried. The sentence has the calm, official tone of common sense, which is exactly how ideology travels best: not as argument, but as atmosphere.

Context matters. Trollope wrote in a world where marriage was an economic institution, a legitimacy machine, and a reputational firewall. Women’s legal identity could be subsumed under coverture; men’s respectability and domestic “order” were measured by their ability to maintain a household. The line’s surface reciprocity masks asymmetry in consequence: both are “incomplete” without marriage, but only one party historically paid in autonomy.

What makes it sting now is how recognizable the tactic remains. Dress a constraint in the language of completion, and it stops sounding like control and starts sounding like destiny.