"For every quarrel a man and wife have before others, they have a hundred when alone"
About this Quote
Domestic harmony is never as public as domestic conflict, and Howe weaponizes that imbalance with a newsroom man’s instinct for what gets printed. The line is built like a quiet exposé: take the one quarrel you overhear at a dinner party and multiply it by a hundred. The number is obviously not a statistic; it’s a jab at our tendency to treat the visible argument as the whole story, when it’s usually just the leak.
Howe’s intent isn’t to play marriage counselor. It’s to puncture the audience’s prurient fascination with other people’s private lives - the genteel Victorian pastime of judging couples by a single scene. By insisting that the real combustion happens “when alone,” he flips the usual assumption: public spats feel like scandal because they break decorum, but they may actually be the tip of a larger, more ordinary grind. The subtext is bleakly democratic. If you’re shocked by a couple bickering in public, Howe suggests, you’re either naive or performing your own respectability.
Context matters: as a late-19th/early-20th-century editor and small-town observer, Howe would have watched reputations built on restraint and ruined by the smallest breach. His cynicism is almost procedural, like an editor’s note on human nature: what you see is edited, what you don’t see is the full draft. The punchline is that privacy doesn’t purify marriage; it just hides the evidence.
Howe’s intent isn’t to play marriage counselor. It’s to puncture the audience’s prurient fascination with other people’s private lives - the genteel Victorian pastime of judging couples by a single scene. By insisting that the real combustion happens “when alone,” he flips the usual assumption: public spats feel like scandal because they break decorum, but they may actually be the tip of a larger, more ordinary grind. The subtext is bleakly democratic. If you’re shocked by a couple bickering in public, Howe suggests, you’re either naive or performing your own respectability.
Context matters: as a late-19th/early-20th-century editor and small-town observer, Howe would have watched reputations built on restraint and ruined by the smallest breach. His cynicism is almost procedural, like an editor’s note on human nature: what you see is edited, what you don’t see is the full draft. The punchline is that privacy doesn’t purify marriage; it just hides the evidence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Husband & Wife |
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