Wealth & Money Quote by Robert Graves

Graves drops this line like a dry match into a room full of sentimental upholstery. Pairing marriage with money isn’t just a clever simile; it’s an insult with a spreadsheet attached. Both are institutions we treat as natural facts, but he frames them as human inventions that persist less because they inspire awe than because they’re embedded in daily life. “Still with us” is the kicker: endurance isn’t evidence of health, only of habit.

The phrase “progressively devalued” borrows the cold language of inflation and applies it to intimacy, implying that modernity hasn’t abolished marriage so much as cheapened its purchasing power. Graves is suggesting that what once carried real social, moral, or spiritual weight has been diluted through overuse, convenience, and changing norms. The subtext is not simply anti-marriage; it’s anti-fetish. He’s suspicious of any structure that claims permanence while quietly losing meaning.

Context matters: Graves lived through two world wars and the wholesale reordering of European social life. In a century of mass bureaucracy, mass media, and mass death, lofty ideals often got repackaged into procedures. Read that way, the line lands as a modernist diagnosis: the institution survives, but its value is no longer anchored. Like currency after a crisis, it circulates everywhere, yet buys less and less of what it promises.