Parenting & Family Quote by Rita Rudner

Rita Rudner lands the joke by treating romance like a custody negotiation. The first sentence, "Marriages don't last", is a blunt little grenade: not a tragedy, not even a complaint, just a deadpan assumption. It’s cynicism delivered with the brisk efficiency of someone who’s seen the stats, read the tabloids, and watched enough friends dissolve into polite estrangement to stop pretending it’s rare.

Then she swerves. Instead of asking the classic dating question - "Is he the one?" - she asks a brutally practical one: "Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?" The intent is comedic inversion: she replaces the fantasy of lifelong togetherness with the logistical reality of post-divorce life. Weekends are doing a lot of work here. They’re supposed to be family time, intimacy time, the sacred remainder after work and school. In Rudner’s version, weekends become visitation slots - a quiet admission that modern love often comes with a legal schedule.

The subtext is sharper than the punchline: choosing a partner isn’t just about desire or compatibility, it’s about future entanglement. Even if the relationship fails, this person may still be in your life indefinitely, parent-adjacent, shaping your kids, your routines, your sense of peace. Rudner makes the audience laugh by voicing what many people privately calculate but rarely say out loud: commitment today is less a vow than a merger with an exit plan. That’s not romance killed off; it’s romance demystified, with a wink and a lawyer in the background.