Marriage Quote by Erica Jong

Jong’s line is a neat reversal of the usual self-help piety about friendship. Friends aren’t framed as rescue ropes or wise witnesses; they’re “invisible glue,” the thing that keeps you stuck. The adjective matters: invisible means you can’t easily name the force that’s holding the marriage together, so you credit habit, finances, children, “complexity” - anything but the social cushioning that makes misery livable.

The intent is less to condemn friends than to expose a quiet collusion. A strong friend network can absorb the overflow of a bad partnership: they provide validation, distraction, company, a place to vent, even a surrogate intimacy. You come home from dinner with people who actually listen and suddenly the marriage feels tolerable for another week. Jong is pointing at a modern trap: support systems can function like anesthesia. Pain dulls, urgency fades.

Her sharpest move is the pivot from “intending to leave” to “talking about leaving.” The quote diagnoses a familiar performance of agency, where speech replaces action. “Talking” keeps you morally aligned with your own unhappiness: you’re the person who knows it’s wrong, who’s preparing to go. But preparation becomes a lifestyle. Friends, in this subtext, don’t just comfort; they become the audience for a long-running narrative of escape that never arrives.

Coming from a novelist associated with frank examinations of women’s desire and autonomy, the context is feminist-adjacent without being slogan-y: it’s about how relationships persist not only through love or obligation, but through the small social mechanisms that make leaving feel less necessary than enduring.