Wit & Attitude Quote by Mignon McLaughlin

Marriage is often sold as a clean narrative arc: two people meet, they choose, they commit, end of story. McLaughlin punctures that myth with a journalist's deadpan empiricism - make two lists, compare notes, watch the categories blur. The line works because it refuses romance and tragedy as separate genres. It treats intimacy like a beat report where the same facts can be filed under "cause" and "consequence", depending on the day and the deadline.

Her punch is in "overlapping", a word that makes divorce feel less like a rupture than a mis-sorted archive. The traits that launch the relationship - ambition, intensity, independence, devotion, thrift, spontaneity - are the exact traits that later become irritants when circumstances change or patience runs out. It's not that people deceive each other; it's that meaning is unstable. What reads as "confident" at 25 can scan as "controlling" at 45. What felt like "easygoing" becomes "checked out". The joke is grim because it's plausible.

Context matters: McLaughlin wrote in mid-century America, when marriage was treated as a civic institution and divorce as a moral failure. Her quip smuggles in a subversive idea: divorce isn't always the opposite of marriage; sometimes it's marriage, continued, under different pressures. By framing it as a simple exercise, she also indicts our desire for tidy causality. We want a single villain, a single turning point. McLaughlin suggests the real culprit is continuity itself - the same human material, stretched over time until it frays.