Marriage Quote by Mary Wesley

A quietly subversive statement dressed up as common sense, Mary Wesley's line refuses the culture's favorite sport: adjudicating other people's intimacy from the outside. The first clause sounds almost legalistic - "judged separately" - as if marriage were a case file, not a fairy tale. That word choice matters. Wesley isn't romanticizing; she's insisting on particulars, on evidence, on the messy facts that don't fit the templates we use to sort couples into "healthy" or "toxic."

The second clause sharpens the blade: "we never know". It's less a plea for kindness than a rebuke to certainty. Wesley wrote novels that strip varnish off respectable surfaces; her characters often live with secrets, compromises, and private bargains that would scandalize the public story of their lives. Read through that lens, the quote becomes a defense of hidden economies - the unspoken agreements, tolerable betrayals, practical loyalties, and emotional workarounds that keep a household intact, or quietly dismantle it.

There's also a moral warning embedded here. When we "judge" marriages as if they were content, we flatten the private into a cautionary tale and treat outcomes (staying, leaving, cheating, forgiving) as virtues or sins. Wesley pushes back against that binary. The line grants adults their complexity and denies outsiders the thrill of verdicts. It's not relativism so much as humility: intimacy generates its own logic, and the audience isn't entitled to it.