Marriage Quote by Benjamin Franklin

Franklin’s line lands like a pocketknife: practical, a little cruel, and sharpened by the kind of worldly humor that passes for wisdom only because it’s so recognizably true. “Eyes wide open” sells the Enlightenment ideal of clear-eyed judgment: assess character, money habits, temperament, family baggage. Marriage, in this framing, isn’t a fairy-tale climax; it’s a contract you sign with your future self as witness.

Then comes the twist: “half shut afterwards.” Franklin isn’t praising blindness so much as prescribing a survival tactic. Once you’ve chosen, relentless scrutiny becomes corrosive. The subtext is that intimacy magnifies petty flaws into daily irritants; a spouse’s habits aren’t new information, they’re background noise. Keeping your eyes fully open after marriage can mean living in a permanent audit, an endless search for mismatch that turns partnership into prosecution. Half shut is shorthand for selective forgiveness, strategic ignoring, the quiet discipline of not escalating every annoyance into a referendum on the relationship.

Context matters: Franklin wrote from a culture where marriage was economic infrastructure, social legitimacy, and household labor management, not just romantic fulfillment. Divorce was rare, women’s options were constrained, and reputations carried real cost. So the advice is bluntly consequential: choose carefully because you may not get a clean exit; then, once bound, cultivate tolerance because the institution demands durability.

It’s also Franklin’s characteristic skepticism toward human perfectibility. The joke works because it acknowledges a hard bargain: we want clarity and comfort at the same time, and marriage forces you to ration one to preserve the other.