Marriage Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken aims his blade at the polite fiction that relationships are primarily rational bargains. He concedes that “mutual interest” matters, then demotes it: what actually binds people, he argues, is the narcotic of safety. That word is doing heavy lifting. “Safe” doesn’t mean virtuous or enlightened; it means insulated from uncertainty, from the risk of being alone with your own thoughts, from the marketplace of human motives. Mencken’s intent is classic: puncture sentimentality while sounding almost clinically reasonable.

The subtext is more cynical than it first appears. By insisting friends “seldom profit us,” Mencken mocks the modern urge to justify intimacy as networking, utility, or self-improvement. Friendship, in his telling, is valuable precisely because it is inefficient: it offers reassurance rather than advantage. That’s not praise so much as a diagnosis of human neediness. We want witnesses who keep the world from feeling hostile.

Then he pivots to marriage and calls it a “scheme,” a word that makes the institution sound less like romance and more like social engineering. Mencken isn’t denying affection; he’s implying the real function of marriage is structural: a formal contract that manufactures predictable comfort and public legitimacy. In early 20th-century America, when marriage was tightly linked to respectability, gender roles, and economic stability, that jab lands with extra force. Mencken’s wit comes from treating the sacred as procedural, exposing how often devotion is recruited as cover for our most basic craving: security dressed up as destiny.