Daily Inspiration Quote by Cathy Guisewite

A comic strip wedding is supposed to be tidy: a bow tied on a character arc, a clean “happily ever after” that resets the gag machine. Cathy Guisewite’s line punctures that expectation with a double admission that lands like a punchline and a confession at once. She’s talking about Cathy-the-character and Cathy-the-creator, and the humor comes from how casually she collapses the boundary between them. For decades, “Cathy” was the avatar of ambivalence: dieting, dating, shopping, panicking, repeating. The strip’s power was its looping anxiety, the sense that adulthood was a treadmill with cute shoes.

So when Guisewite says she never thought the character would get married, she’s really describing the narrative contract she’d made with her readers: this was a strip about not arriving. Marriage is arrival. It’s closure. It threatens the engine of complaint and recognition that made “Cathy” culturally sticky in the first place.

Then she swivels: “And I also thought I would never get married.” That second sentence re-frames the first as self-portraiture, not just craft talk. The subtext is that the strip wasn’t merely observing single womanhood in late-20th-century America; it was inhabited by it. In a media culture that treated marriage as the default finish line for women, Guisewite’s surprise reads like a quiet rebuke: the “expected” life doesn’t always feel inevitable from the inside. The line works because it treats a major life shift with the same deadpan incredulity that fueled Cathy’s daily meltdowns, letting personal change and pop narrative change mirror each other without sentimentality.