Marriage Quote by Bette Davis

Bette Davis delivers this like a wicked toast: raise a glass to scandal, then slip the knife in on “I ought to know.” The line performs the exact maneuver it describes. It flirts with transgression as marital self-care, sells infidelity as seasoning, then reveals the real punchline is experience, not theory. That last clause re-frames everything before it as both confession and dare, a celebrity’s authority weaponized into humor.

The intent isn’t to hand out relationship advice so much as to puncture the sanctimony around marriage. Davis came up in an era when Hollywood ran on carefully pressed illusions: studio morality clauses on paper, messy private lives in practice. Her quote thrives in that gap. Calling an affair “good” sounds like a provocation aimed at polite society, but it’s also a show-business survival tactic: if everyone’s performing fidelity, the honest move is to admit the performance.

Subtext-wise, “spice” and “boring” are doing a lot of work. She’s not romanticizing betrayal; she’s diagnosing monotony as the true villain and suggesting that marriage, as institution, often asks adults to live like saints. Davis’s voice - unsentimental, iron-boned - makes the cynicism feel earned rather than cute. “I ought to know” lands as a shrug with teeth: intimacy is complicated, virtue is negotiable, and the people who pretend otherwise are usually selling something.