Daily Inspiration Quote by Edgar Watson Howe

Marriage, in Howe's telling, isn't romance; it's a liability you willingly sign for. "Married into" is the knife twist: trouble isn't random bad luck or cosmic injustice, it's acquired property, the domestic equivalent of buying a house on a floodplain because the porch looked charming at sunset.

Howe writes like an editor who has spent years watching the same plot run through the local paper: promising young man marries money and gets debts, marries status and gets scrutiny, marries beauty and gets competition, marries "a good family" and inherits the whole clan. The intent is corrective, almost journalistic. He's trying to puncture a sentimental culture that treats marriage as a moral upgrade, a stabilizing institution that automatically fixes a life. His punchline argues the opposite: marriage doesn't clean up your mess; it expands your exposure.

The subtext is less about blaming spouses than about agency and denial. People prefer to narrate their misfortunes as accidents. Howe suggests many of them are choices dressed up as fate, and marriage is where that self-deception becomes socially protected. Once you're "married into" something, responsibility gets diffused: it's tradition, it's family obligations, it's just how things are.

Context matters: Howe lived in an era when marriage was also a financial merger and a civic expectation, especially in small-town America where an editor sat near the moral switchboard. The line works because it treats marriage not as a sacred abstraction, but as a practical contract with consequences - and it leaves you with an uncomfortable question modern advice culture still dodges: did you pick a person, or did you pick a package?