Life & Mortality Quote by Clare Boothe Luce

Jealousy is usually pitched as the petty villain in the marriage story; Clare Boothe Luce flips the script and makes it the only rational response. That reversal is the engine of the line: it’s funny because it’s bleakly practical. If you have a "really good reason" to be jealous, you’re not suffering from insecurity, you’re responding to evidence. But Luce’s punchline is that evidence doesn’t make jealousy safer; it makes it fatal.

The phrase "matrimonial suicide" is doing heavy lifting. Suicide isn’t an accident or a harmless indulgence, it’s a deliberate self-destruction. Luce implies that once suspicion is justified, the marriage is already structurally compromised. Acting jealous doesn’t protect the relationship; it speeds up the inevitable collapse by dragging the ugliness into the open: surveillance, accusations, self-humiliation, the slow conversion of love into litigation. The smart sting is that restraint doesn’t save you either. Not being jealous may preserve appearances, but at the price of self-respect. Jealousy becomes the symptom you can’t afford to show, even when the diagnosis is correct.

As a dramatist with a journalist’s ear for the cruelest efficient phrasing, Luce writes marriage as a social contract under pressure, not a sacred refuge. The line reads like cocktail wit, but it’s also a warning about power: when betrayal is plausible, the person who needs proof is already losing. The "good reason" isn’t a permission slip; it’s the obituary.