Marriage Quote by Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor turns her most-tabloid-friendly statistic into a punchline, then uses the laugh to seize control of the story. The line hinges on a double meaning of "committed": devotion in marriage, and institutionalization for behavior society deems excessive or unstable. By letting the second definition crash the first, she exposes the moral bookkeeping women are expected to live by: a man collects marriages and gets called complicated; a woman does it and gets treated like a case file.

The intent is defensive and aggressive at once. She preempts the judgment by voicing it herself, but she doesn’t apologize. "Very committed wife" is a deliberately upright phrase, almost prim, set up as bait for the twist: "And I should be committed too". The joke isn’t only that she married often; it’s that the culture responds to female desire, reinvention, and public romantic failure with medicalized language. Taylor treats that reflex as absurd, which makes the audience complicit in recognizing it.

Context matters: Taylor lived in an era when celebrity women were both fetishized and disciplined, their private lives marketed as public property. Her multiple marriages, especially the Burton saga, became a kind of ongoing serial for a pre-internet attention economy. The quote functions as PR without sounding like PR: wit as boundary-setting. She converts scandal into personality, and personality into authority, reminding everyone that the "wild" narrative was always co-authored by the people selling it.