"If I get married, I want to be very married"
About this Quote
There is steel under the satin in Audrey Hepburn's line, a little verbal pirouette that turns romantic cliché into a boundary. "If I get married" opens with contingency, not yearning. It signals agency: marriage is an option, not a destiny. Then comes the punch: "I want to be very married". Hepburn takes a binary institution and exaggerates it into a gradient, as if marriage were a role you could half-play for the cameras or inhabit completely off-screen. The humor is light, but the subtext is hard-edged: no performative partnership, no tasteful arrangement, no marriage as accessory.
It also works because of who is saying it. Hepburn's public image was purity and poise, the woman people projected ideals onto: elegance, restraint, the eternal ingenue. That mythology often demanded she be available as a fantasy, even when her real life included war trauma, complicated relationships, and intense privacy. "Very married" reads like a refusal to be circulated as a symbol. If she is going to step into a traditional script, it will be on her terms, with total commitment rather than public ambiguity.
Culturally, the line lands as a quiet critique of Hollywood's half-marriages: unions made for headlines, alliances maintained for optics, love marketed as lifestyle. Hepburn doesn't romanticize marriage; she raises the stakes. Commitment becomes not a surrender but a standard.
It also works because of who is saying it. Hepburn's public image was purity and poise, the woman people projected ideals onto: elegance, restraint, the eternal ingenue. That mythology often demanded she be available as a fantasy, even when her real life included war trauma, complicated relationships, and intense privacy. "Very married" reads like a refusal to be circulated as a symbol. If she is going to step into a traditional script, it will be on her terms, with total commitment rather than public ambiguity.
Culturally, the line lands as a quiet critique of Hollywood's half-marriages: unions made for headlines, alliances maintained for optics, love marketed as lifestyle. Hepburn doesn't romanticize marriage; she raises the stakes. Commitment becomes not a surrender but a standard.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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