Marriage Quote by Judith Viorst

A perfect one-liner for the way desire likes to cosplay as virtue. Judith Viorst takes the polite costume of domestic competence - "wonderful wife" - and yanks it into scandal with a single prepositional twist: not to my husband, but to "another wife's husband". The comedy lands because the speaker isn't selling sex; she's selling service. She frames herself as an upgrade in emotional labor, a more attentive manager of someone else's home life, and that is exactly the indictment.

The subtext is envy sharpened into fantasy. The speaker isn't necessarily in love with a particular man; she's in love with the idea that the problem in the marriage is the wife, not the structure, not the husband, not the messy fact that intimacy isn't a job you can simply perform better. Viorst nails a common rationalization: adultery as competence. If I can do it "wonderfully", then it's not betrayal, it's rescue.

Context matters because Viorst's work often skewers the mythologies women inherit about romance and marriage: that being chosen is proof of worth, that caretaking is currency, that a woman's value can be measured by how smoothly she can run a man's life. The line is funny, but it's also bleak. It exposes how the institution of wifehood becomes a competitive sport, where the prize is a man already spoken for - and the speaker can only imagine herself as "wife", never simply as herself.