"It had not occurred to me that marriage requires the same effort as a career. And unlike a career, marriage requires a joint effort"
About this Quote
There is a quiet trapdoor in Savitch's phrasing: she confesses a personal blind spot, then widens it into an indictment of how marriage is sold. The first sentence lands like a professional revelation. We’re trained to respect career as labor - ambition, discipline, stamina - but marriage gets marketed as an achievement you unlock, not a practice you maintain. Savitch punctures that fantasy with the plainest possible comparison: the relationship is work, and not the cute kind.
The second sentence is the knife twist, because it reframes what makes that work so hard. A career can be brute-forced through willpower; you can compensate for a bad boss by outworking them, or at least you can pretend you can. Marriage doesn’t let you live in that delusion. It is structurally collaborative. Your effort is only half the engine, and sometimes half the steering wheel. In an era that was still digesting second-wave feminism’s promise that professional doors could be pushed open, Savitch spotlights a more awkward truth: equality at work doesn’t automatically translate into equality at home. If anything, it raises the stakes, because now both partners may be running careers while still expecting intimacy to run on autopilot.
Coming from a high-profile broadcast journalist, the line reads less like advice than like field reporting from the inside. It’s a sober dispatch from someone who understood that public competence doesn’t immunize you against private negotiation - and that the most demanding job might be the one you can’t do alone.
The second sentence is the knife twist, because it reframes what makes that work so hard. A career can be brute-forced through willpower; you can compensate for a bad boss by outworking them, or at least you can pretend you can. Marriage doesn’t let you live in that delusion. It is structurally collaborative. Your effort is only half the engine, and sometimes half the steering wheel. In an era that was still digesting second-wave feminism’s promise that professional doors could be pushed open, Savitch spotlights a more awkward truth: equality at work doesn’t automatically translate into equality at home. If anything, it raises the stakes, because now both partners may be running careers while still expecting intimacy to run on autopilot.
Coming from a high-profile broadcast journalist, the line reads less like advice than like field reporting from the inside. It’s a sober dispatch from someone who understood that public competence doesn’t immunize you against private negotiation - and that the most demanding job might be the one you can’t do alone.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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