Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A little dislike, Sheridan implies, is the most practical dowry you can bring to a marriage. Coming from an 18th-century playwright who made a sport of puncturing polite society, the line isn’t marriage advice so much as a scalpel aimed at the era’s sentimental myths. In Sheridan’s world, matrimony is less a sacred culmination of romance than a social contract negotiated under chandeliers: money, reputation, and family interest doing the heavy lifting while “love” provides the decorative script.

The wit works because it flips the expected moral. We’re trained to think affection is the foundation; Sheridan suggests the opposite: mild aversion acts as a safety mechanism. It lowers expectations, inoculates against idealization, and keeps both partners from the dangerous intoxication of projection. If you begin with a clear-eyed skepticism - an awareness of the other person’s capacity to irritate you, constrain you, outvote you - you’re less likely to be blindsided when domestic reality arrives with its petty tyrannies.

There’s also a sly class critique embedded here. In a marriage market where alliances are brokered, “aversion” can be read as honesty surfacing through the varnish. A little resistance signals you’re not merely performing courtship, not overinvesting in the fiction that desire equals compatibility. Sheridan’s cynicism lands because it feels empirically true: sustainable intimacy often depends less on rapture than on tolerable friction, the kind you can live with without turning marriage into a courtroom drama.