Marriage Quote by Arnold Bennett

Bennett smuggles a modern critique of marriage into the blunt language of labor. Calling husbandry a "whole-time job" sounds like a compliment to commitment, but it’s also a sneaky demotion: the romantic ideal gets recast as shift work, with all the fatigue, distraction, and performance anxiety that implies. The line lands because it treats failure not as a moral collapse but as an attention problem. Not cruelty, not vice, not even incompatibility - just the everyday erosion caused by competing demands.

The subtext is sharper than it first appears. In Bennett's era, "husband" carried legal and economic authority; men were presumed to be the managers of the household, not its emotional staff. By insisting that the role requires "entire attention", Bennett flips that assumption. Power isn’t the point. Presence is. The jab is aimed at the husband who thinks providing money or status is interchangeable with actually showing up, listening, adjusting, noticing.

There’s also a sly comment about modernity itself: the early 20th century is a factory of partial attention, a culture where work, clubs, politics, and public life make domestic intimacy feel like an after-hours obligation. Bennett frames marital competence as the ability to treat the private sphere with the same seriousness men reserve for their careers - and he’s cynical enough to suggest most won’t. The wit is in the fatalism: not everyone can hold down two full-time jobs, and marriage, he implies, is the one men keep trying to do on the side.