Wealth & Money Quote by William Wycherley

Wycherley is doing what Restoration comedy does best: taking an institution everyone is supposed to revere and treating it like a rigged table in a smoky room. The line is engineered as a double insult. Marriage, the era's official pipeline to respectability, gets recast as a speculative investment, and love, supposedly marriage's moral payoff, becomes the bait. The punch is that the buyer is already poor. You enter with "little stock" of affection or innocence, and the house still wins.

The subtext is less romantic cynicism than social arithmetic. In Wycherley's world, marriage often consolidates property, repairs reputations, and disciplines desire; it doesn't reliably produce tenderness. So the joke isn't merely that people marry for the wrong reasons, but that the institution itself is structurally misaligned with the thing it advertises. Pairing "marrying" with "gaming" drags polite society into the same moral category as vice. It's a Restoration-era mic drop: the respectable and the disreputable are adjacent businesses with different signage.

Context matters. Wycherley wrote in a post-Puritan, courtly culture where sexual candor and status anxiety coexisted, and marriage could look like a transaction performed in public to manage private appetites. The aphorism lands because it weaponizes a familiar metaphor (risk, stakes, loss) against a cherished narrative (marriage as love's amplifier). It also flatters the audience's sophistication: only the naive think the ceremony changes the odds.