Life & Wisdom Quote by Washington Irving

Irving skewers marriage with the cool smile of a writer who knows the polite story and prefers the footnote. The line works because it pretends to be a tidy mathematical truth - one, two, three - then uses that neat progression to smuggle in a social critique: marriage is less a sacred institution than a stage where the cast size determines the genre. With one person, it is “torment”: desire and loneliness curdle into self-pity, obsession, or the private melodrama of needing to be chosen. With two, it becomes “felicity,” not because Irving is suddenly sentimental, but because the couple can sustain the illusion of a closed world. Two people can narrate their life as destiny, a partnership, a romance with manageable conflict.

Then Irving drops the real blade: “three.” The third presence could be a child, an in-law, a lover, a friend, or even the public itself. Any additional witness punctures the couple’s bubble and forces the marriage to become politics: alliances, divided loyalties, resource allocation, reputation management. “Strife and enmity” aren’t just jealousy; they’re the inevitable friction of turning a private pact into a small society.

Context matters: Irving writes from an early-19th-century Anglo-American world where marriage was economic infrastructure as much as affection, and domestic life was newly marketed as a moral ideal. His wit isn’t anti-love so much as anti-myth. He’s warning that the institution sells harmony while quietly generating its own antagonists the moment it stops being a duet.