Marriage Quote by Edward Albee

A marriage implodes so completely that the speaker has to invent a spouse just to have someone to leave. That’s the joke, and it lands with Albee’s signature cruelty: divorce as an act of agency, but also as a performance staged for an audience that may not even be there. The line turns absence into provocation. It’s not “we’re over,” it’s “you were never real, and I’m still angry enough to file paperwork.”

Albee, the great anatomist of domestic warfare, understood that modern intimacy often runs on scripts we inherit and repeat. Here, the speaker’s threat is hollow in the literal sense (there’s no partner), yet emotionally precise: the need to assign blame doesn’t require an actual culprit, only a role. The imaginary spouse becomes a receptacle for disappointment, resentment, and the humiliation of wanting a conventional life that refuses to materialize.

The phrasing “I swear” is doing heavy lifting. It mimics the language of vows and courtroom oaths, invoking the institutions that sanctify and dissolve relationships. Albee twists that ritual language into farce: a vow used to revoke a vow that was never made. The line also functions as a flex - if you existed, I’d have the power to end you - revealing how much of marital conflict is about control disguised as principle.

Contextually, it fits Albee’s postwar stage: couples and would-be couples tearing at each other to prove they’re alive, real, consequential. Even solitude becomes a battleground, and the fiercest fights can be with ghosts we manufacture to justify our pain.