Marriage Quote by Oliver Goldsmith

Marriage gets framed as fate or fever; Goldsmith coolly frames it as fabric. The line is a flirt with romance that ultimately sides with durability: a wife is chosen the way a wedding gown is chosen, for “qualities that would wear well.” It’s a domestic metaphor sharpened into social critique. In an 18th-century world where marriage was often a merger of households, reputations, and prospects, “wear” isn’t just about time passing - it’s about public scrutiny, daily friction, and the slow abrasions of cohabitation. Goldsmith’s joke lands because it treats the sacred as mundane without fully desacralizing it; he’s not saying love is irrelevant, he’s saying love without endurance is a costume change.

The subtext is half compliment, half warning. A gown selected to “wear well” suggests taste, restraint, and an eye for the long game, not the flash of novelty. By pairing the wife’s choice with her own choice of dress, he gives her agency while also quietly importing the era’s consumer logic into intimacy: people, like garments, are evaluated for performance. That’s where the irony bites. The phrasing flatters prudence, yet it reveals a culture so obsessed with appearances that even affection borrows the language of textiles.

Goldsmith, a poet with a satirist’s ear for pretension, uses the line to puncture the sentimentality around marriage. The wit isn’t decorative; it’s diagnostic, turning a romantic institution into a question of materials, maintenance, and what survives the wash.