Marriage Quote by Christopher Hampton

There’s a cool, poisonous elegance to Hampton’s line: it doesn’t just judge adultery; it judges the entire competitive frame that adultery invites. The speaker isn’t confessing heartbreak so much as refusing to let desire be reduced to a domestic tournament where the prize is a man with a mortgage and habits. “Degrading” is the key tell. The insult isn’t that the husband exists, but that he’s the measuring stick. To have “a husband for a rival” is to accept the rules of bourgeois life even while breaking them, to let the institution you’re transgressing set the terms of your self-worth.

The second sentence is a neatly sprung trap. Hampton rigs both outcomes to feel bad, which reveals the speaker’s deeper anxiety: not moral guilt, but status and narrative. “Humiliating if you fail” is obvious; rejection confirms you were merely a diversion. “Commonplace if you succeed” is sharper. Winning doesn’t deliver romance; it delivers a cliché. You don’t become extraordinary; you become another person who helped turn a marriage into a familiar story of exit and replacement. Victory collapses into banality.

As a playwright, Hampton is especially attuned to that problem: the dread of living inside a plot you’ve seen before. The line’s intent is defensive and performative at once, a way to keep dignity by declaring the game unwinnable. Underneath the wit is a class-conscious, gendered sting: to compete for a husband is to compete for someone else’s legitimacy, and the speaker would rather be lonely than be legible in such an ordinary way.