Marriage Quote by Ouida

Domestic bliss, in Ouida's telling, is less a romantic ideal than a survival strategy. "An easy-going husband" is framed not as a pleasant bonus but as "the one indispensable comfort of life" - a line that snaps with both wit and resignation. The joke is barbed: if marriage is the central institution shaping a woman's daily reality, then the best possible outcome is not passion or equality, but a man who doesn't interfere too much.

The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. "Easy-going" flatters by diminishing; it suggests a husband valuable primarily for his absence of friction, a soft obstacle rather than a partner. "Indispensable comfort" borrows the language of necessity, as if the home were a climate you endure and a tolerant spouse were your only reliable shelter. It's affectionate on the surface, but the subtext reads like a critique of how little room women had to maneuver in respectable society: when divorce is scandal, property laws tilt male, and social legitimacy flows through marriage, the dream shrinks into something manageable.

Ouida wrote in the late Victorian orbit - a period obsessed with propriety, yet riddled with anxieties about gender roles and the "woman question". Her novels often leaned glamorous and caustic, staging high-society romances while needling hypocrisy. This line fits that sensibility: it sounds like a drawing-room aphorism, but it carries a structural complaint. The indispensable comfort isn't love; it's permission. An easy-going husband is the rare man who grants a woman peace inside a system designed to deny it.