Life & Wisdom Quote by Jane Rule

Rule turns love into contraband: a "terrible secret" that polite society sniffs out like smoke under a door. The line is funny, but it’s the kind of funny that lands because it’s cruelly accurate about how surveillance works. Outside marriage, love is treated as evidence of deviance or disorder, something that must be explained, categorized, contained. Inside marriage, love becomes the opposite: a presumed absence, a performance no one quite believes, like a public oath repeated so often it starts to sound like paperwork.

The sentence is built on a neat rhetorical trap. "Suspected of" makes love sound like a crime, then the pivot - "unless they're married" - flips the legal presumption. Marriage, supposedly the social home for love, is presented as the institution that most reliably produces doubt about it. Rule is not being cute; she’s exposing the way legitimacy and intimacy get uncoupled. What society approves is not necessarily what it trusts.

Context matters. Rule, a Canadian novelist and essayist, wrote as a lesbian in a period when same-sex love was still routinely framed as illicit, pathological, or merely "private". The quote reads like a compressed field report from that world: desire policed when it sits outside the sanctioned box, dismissed as hollow when it sits inside it. The subtext is a quiet indictment of social scripts that prefer stability over truth. Love, Rule suggests, is hardest to see precisely where institutions claim to guarantee it.