Time & Perspective Quote by Samuel Richardson

Richardson sells marriage the way an 18th-century novelist would: not as thunderbolt romance, but as a rational technology for living. Calling it "the highest state of friendship" is a quiet rebuke to the era's transactional matches and their accompanying cynicism. Friendship implies choice, conversation, and moral equality - qualities the marriage market often sidelined in favor of property, lineage, and obedience. He is smuggling an ideal of companionship into a contract culture.

The sentence is built like a ledger. Cares get "divided"; pleasures get "doubled". That arithmetic does cultural work. It reframes intimacy as shared management: emotional labor split across two people, joys made larger through witness. "Mutual participation" is doing heavy lifting here. It's not merely that one person benefits from the other's support; it's that happiness is co-authored, a collaborative practice. Richardson's conditional, "If happy", is the tell. He knows marriage can also concentrate cares, not disperse them, and that the institution can function as a mechanism of control - especially for women - rather than relief.

Context matters: Richardson wrote in a Britain where the novel was becoming a moral laboratory for domestic life. His fiction stages courtship as an ethical test, trying to reconcile personal feeling with social expectation. This line reads like an aspiration he wants readers to internalize: marry as you would choose a friend, and the institution can be redeemed from mere arrangement into partnership. It's both sentimental and strategic, a pitch for modern marriage before the modern vocabulary existed.