Marriage Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt isn’t offering a Hallmark warning about heartbreak; he’s prosecuting dependency as a daily form of self-sabotage. The bite of the line is in its setup: he starts with “the common affairs of life” and then names the supposedly safest harbors - love, friendship, marriage. By the time he lands on “how little security,” the reader has already granted those relationships a moral exemption. Hazlitt yanks that exemption away.

The sentence works because it treats happiness like property you can sign over, then asks why you’d be shocked when the investment turns volatile. “Trust our happiness in the hands of others” is a deliberately physical image: your well-being becomes an object, passed across a counter. The subtext is not that other people are uniquely cruel; it’s that their priorities are irreducibly their own. Even the best intentions come with weather, whims, and weariness. Security is scarce not because affection is fake, but because autonomy can’t be subcontracted.

As a critic formed in the post-Enlightenment, post-revolutionary churn of late 18th and early 19th century Britain, Hazlitt writes with the era’s nervousness about authority - political, religious, domestic. His skepticism is democratic in spirit: no sovereign, no spouse, no friend gets to rule the inner life without risk. The cynicism is edged with tenderness; he’s describing love’s hazard honestly, not dismissing love. The line’s real provocation is modern: it anticipates a culture that romanticizes “being someone’s everything,” then acts surprised when that bargain collapses under the weight of ordinary human limits.