"Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage"
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Harris lands the jab with a neat bit of asymmetry: we accept that careers demand training, luck, timing, and a tolerance for failure, but we smuggle an entitlement mindset into romance. The line works because it frames marriage as the one arena where modern people expect a participation trophy simply for showing up with good intentions. It’s not just a complaint about selfish spouses; it’s an indictment of a culture that treats love as identity-confirmation rather than a craft.
The specific intent is to puncture the fantasy that marriage is a natural reward for being a basically decent person. Harris is pointing at a quiet hypocrisy: we wouldn’t walk into law, medicine, or even amateur tennis and assume greatness is owed to us, yet we approach partnership as if sincerity should cancel out skill. Underneath is a provocation about effort and accountability. If success in work is something you build, why do we treat relational competence - communication, repair, patience, negotiation - as optional add-ons?
Context matters. Writing in mid-20th-century America, Harris is watching marriage shift from economic arrangement and social duty toward companionate ideal and personal fulfillment. That upgrade brings higher expectations, but also a new kind of disappointment: if marriage is supposed to deliver happiness automatically, then dissatisfaction must mean the spouse is defective, not that the relationship needs work. The cynicism here is controlled, journalist-clean, and still sharp enough to sting: entitlement is the fastest way to turn intimacy into grievance.
The specific intent is to puncture the fantasy that marriage is a natural reward for being a basically decent person. Harris is pointing at a quiet hypocrisy: we wouldn’t walk into law, medicine, or even amateur tennis and assume greatness is owed to us, yet we approach partnership as if sincerity should cancel out skill. Underneath is a provocation about effort and accountability. If success in work is something you build, why do we treat relational competence - communication, repair, patience, negotiation - as optional add-ons?
Context matters. Writing in mid-20th-century America, Harris is watching marriage shift from economic arrangement and social duty toward companionate ideal and personal fulfillment. That upgrade brings higher expectations, but also a new kind of disappointment: if marriage is supposed to deliver happiness automatically, then dissatisfaction must mean the spouse is defective, not that the relationship needs work. The cynicism here is controlled, journalist-clean, and still sharp enough to sting: entitlement is the fastest way to turn intimacy into grievance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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