Love Quote by Samuel Richardson

Handsome husbands, Richardson implies, are a domestic luxury that behaves like a liability. The line flips the period's ideal of marriage as a stabilizing contract into something closer to an anxiety machine: beauty, in a man, is not just pleasing but socially catalytic. It attracts attention, invites comparison, and turns a wife's private bond into a public contest she never agreed to enter.

Richardson is writing in an 18th-century moral universe where reputation is a form of currency and women's security is tightly tethered to it. A "wife's heart ache" isn't only romantic insecurity; it's the ache of surveillance. A handsome husband is a moving target in a culture that treats flirtation as sport and female jealousy as both expected and contemptible. The wife is asked to be dignified, trusting, and self-effacing while also being held responsible for whatever chaos male desirability stirs up. The cruelty is structural: she can't compete openly without seeming "unfeminine", but she can't ignore the threat without risking being blindsided.

The phrasing matters. "Often" gives it the cool authority of observation, not accusation; Richardson isn't condemning the husband, he's diagnosing a pattern. And "ache" is a quiet verb, more chronic than explosive, suggesting marriage as endurance rather than climax. It's a novelist's insight delivered like a proverb: the same traits society praises in men can, inside the marriage plot, become a steady source of dread for the women expected to keep the plot from breaking.