Marriage Quote by Charles Bukowski

Marriage, in Bukowski's hands, isn’t a vow so much as a dare: he wants the social gravity of being "married" without the domestic bargain that word usually smuggles in. The line turns commitment into a private contract, a kind of anti-romantic matrimony to solitude. That inversion is the trick. By keeping the ceremonial language ("I would be married") and stripping out its expected object ("but I'd have no wife"), he exposes how much of marriage is performance, paperwork, and public legibility. He’s not just dodging intimacy; he’s refusing the script.

The subtext is classic Bukowski: a man who’s seen love curdle into obligation, who distrusts respectable arrangements because they smell like soft cages. "Single life" isn’t framed as lack, but as partner and principle. It carries the bartender-poet pragmatism of someone who knows his own damage and would rather own it than export it. There’s also a sly self-mythology at work: the lone writer as spouse to freedom, to booze, to the page, to the messy sanctity of living unaccountable.

Context matters because Bukowski’s persona was built on antagonism toward middle-class virtue. In postwar America, marriage sold itself as stability and adulthood; he replies with a vow to remain unclaimed, even while borrowing marriage’s language of permanence. It works because it’s both confession and provocation: loneliness dressed up as autonomy, autonomy defended like a romance.