"It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married"
About this Quote
Frost delivers this like a wry aside over a fence line: marriage as the hobby of the worry-free. The joke lands because it reverses the expected script. Marriage, in polite rhetoric, is stability, completion, moral adulthood. Frost treats it instead as self-administered weather - a decision to invite storms when the sky is clear. That inversion is pure Frost: plain diction, country logic, and a blade hidden in the hay.
The specific intent isn’t to sneer at love; it’s to puncture the sentimental story that matrimony is the cure for life’s anxieties. Frost’s man marries not because he’s solved the world, but because he’s restless without friction. When external pressures ease, we manufacture stakes. Marriage becomes an existential project: a chosen set of obligations, compromises, and daily negotiations that will, guaranteed, give you something to worry about. It’s funny because it’s recognizable and a little indicting.
The subtext carries Frost’s darker theme: human beings aren’t built for serenity. We crave meaning, and meaning often arrives dressed as responsibility. Read this against Frost’s broader work - the tension between freedom and duty, the costs of intimacy, the way “home” can feel like both shelter and trap - and the line starts to sound less like a one-liner and more like a diagnosis.
It also reflects the early-20th-century American marriage ideal as social anchor. Frost’s twist is to show the anchor’s weight, not just its security.
The specific intent isn’t to sneer at love; it’s to puncture the sentimental story that matrimony is the cure for life’s anxieties. Frost’s man marries not because he’s solved the world, but because he’s restless without friction. When external pressures ease, we manufacture stakes. Marriage becomes an existential project: a chosen set of obligations, compromises, and daily negotiations that will, guaranteed, give you something to worry about. It’s funny because it’s recognizable and a little indicting.
The subtext carries Frost’s darker theme: human beings aren’t built for serenity. We crave meaning, and meaning often arrives dressed as responsibility. Read this against Frost’s broader work - the tension between freedom and duty, the costs of intimacy, the way “home” can feel like both shelter and trap - and the line starts to sound less like a one-liner and more like a diagnosis.
It also reflects the early-20th-century American marriage ideal as social anchor. Frost’s twist is to show the anchor’s weight, not just its security.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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