Marriage Quote by Max Frisch

Frisch drops the sentimental scaffolding around marriage and asks a brutal either/or: if it is destiny, it has gravity; if it is anything less, it’s theater. The line works because it weaponizes a romantic word ("destiny") against romance itself. He’s not endorsing fate so much as exposing how marriage borrows the language of the absolute to justify a very contingent arrangement: property, sex, social legitimacy, companionship, routine. Strip away the aura, and what’s left can feel suspiciously like "humbug" - a performance people agree to applaud because the alternative is admitting they’ve built a life on convenience and custom.

The intent is diagnostic, not decorative. Frisch is pressing on the institution’s most vulnerable seam: its insistence that a private choice is also a public truth. If marriage is merely a contract, why all the rituals and lifelong vows? If it’s only a lifestyle option, why the moral prestige? "No sense in it at all" is the cold logic of a novelist trained to notice narrative falsity. Marriage, in this framing, survives by selling itself as plot: one person, one arc, one permanent meaning.

Context matters. Writing in a postwar European world that had watched grand narratives curdle into catastrophe, Frisch is suspicious of any story that demands total belief. His novels repeatedly worry at identity as something performed and revised, not discovered once and sealed. That’s the subtext here: marriage promises a finished self and a finished love. Frisch calls that promise either sacred or fraudulent - and refuses the comforting middle.