Marriage Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden takes a swipe at the culture of fireworks. Romance, in his framing, is the easy spectacle: “fleeting emotion” that feels profound precisely because it arrives unbidden. Marriage is harder to sentimentalize because it belongs to a different category of human action entirely: the “creation of time and will.” That phrase is doing the heavy lifting. Time is not just duration; it’s erosion, repetition, boredom, relapse, repair. Will is not just commitment; it’s the daily, often unglamorous decision to keep building a shared life when the mood has stopped cooperating.

The provocative twist is that Auden refuses to grade marriage by happiness. “Happy or unhappy” gets equal billing because the point isn’t that marriage is morally superior, it’s that it’s narratively and psychologically denser. A romance can be “however passionate” and still be thin, because passion is a single note played loudly. Marriage accumulates plot: negotiations over money, sex, labor, resentment, illness, ambition, family, aging. Even failure becomes interesting because it reveals character under pressure and over time, not just in the flush of desire.

Context matters: Auden lived through the 20th century’s disenchantments and wrote as a modernist wary of easy transcendence. His skepticism isn’t anti-love; it’s anti-myth. He’s telling you where the real story is: not in the lightning strike, but in what two people can (or cannot) deliberately make after the weather passes.