Marriage Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson lands the line like a physician delivering a diagnosis he half-believes and fully enjoys: marriage as “fatty degeneration,” not of the waistline but of the conscience. The phrase is comic in its cruelty. It borrows the cold authority of Victorian medical language and grafts it onto morality, implying that domestic life doesn’t just soften a man; it pathologizes him. “Slack and selfish” reads less like a scandalous confession than a caricature of the bourgeois husband who mistakes comfort for character.

The intent isn’t simply to sneer at matrimony. It’s to puncture a culture that sold marriage as the apex of respectability and ethical maturity. Stevenson flips that script: the institution designed to civilize men becomes the perfect excuse for their ethical atrophy. The subtext is about complacency. Once a man is socially “settled,” his incentives change. He can outsource risk, imagination, and even decency to routine. The home becomes both shield and alibi.

Context matters: Stevenson is writing in a period that prized public virtue and private order, yet tolerated massive gender asymmetries. His target is explicitly “a man,” and that specificity is telling. Victorian marriage often granted men the power to become “slack” without consequence, while women were tasked with keeping the moral thermostat set to “upright.” The joke carries a sting: it’s not that marriage inherently corrupts, but that society lets married men treat security as entitlement. Stevenson’s genius is to make that entitlement sound not romantic, but clinical.