Parenting & Family Quote by Richard Armour

Marriage, in Armour's hands, survives less by romance than by sheer distraction. The line pretends to offer homespun wisdom about kids as emotional glue, then yanks the rug: children "hold a marriage together" not by deepening intimacy but by exhausting it into temporary blindness. Its engine is misdirection. The first sentence sounds like a conservative platitude, almost advice-column earnest. The follow-up swerves into a joke with teeth: the kids don't fix the couple; they simply monopolize the bandwidth that might otherwise be spent litigating irritations.

Armour's intent is classic mid-century American domestic satire, written from inside the era that treated marriage as a civic institution and parenthood as its natural reinforcement. By phrasing the critique as a practical mechanism ("in a number of ways", "for instance"), he mimics the tone of a manual, which makes the cynicism land harder. The subtext isn't anti-child so much as anti-myth: if a partnership depends on not noticing each other's faults, it was never exactly sturdy. Children become a social alibi for avoidance, a culturally sanctioned project that can substitute for the messier work of adult honesty.

As a poet-humorist, Armour compresses an entire sociology of family life into a tidy reversal: the marriage is "together", sure, but possibly only because everyone is too tired to take it apart. The wit functions as permission to think a forbidden thought - that stability can be a byproduct of overload, not devotion.