Marriage Quote by Sue Townsend

Townsend slips a shiv into a sentimental cliche: the idea that longevity automatically equals destiny. The line opens with that disarming, conversational shrug - "I think" - as if she's merely musing, when she's really setting a trap for a cultural assumption. "We take it for granted" is the tell. She's not talking about one couple; she's talking about the social script that turns endurance into proof, survival into romance, and habit into a halo.

The bite comes from her careful vagueness. "If you are with your husband after 30 years" sounds like a congratulatory badge, but it also smuggles in everything we don't put on anniversary cards: economic dependence, fear of starting over, sunk costs, dutifulness, inertia, the quiet negotiations that keep a household running. Townsend's novels, especially the Adrian Mole books, are full of people trapped between what they're supposed to feel and what they actually feel. So the sentence reads like a corrective to the tidy narratives we impose on messy lives.

There's gendered subtext too. "Your husband" isn't neutral; it's a nod to a generation raised on marriage as a primary measure of female success, where staying can be praised more than being fulfilled. Townsend isn't scorning commitment. She's questioning the romance-industrial reflex that retrofits meaning onto duration, as if time itself is evidence of transcendent love.

The specific intent is to puncture complacency: stop mistaking persistence for passion, and stop using "love of your life" as a socially acceptable way to avoid asking harder questions about choice, agency, and the stories we tell to make staying feel inevitable.