Time & Perspective Quote by Richard Armour

Armour’s joke lands with the sly timing of a rimshot: middle age doesn’t arrive as an internal reckoning, but as a “discovery” outsourced to the nearest woman. The sting is in the grammar. “First notices” pretends to be observational, almost tenderly clueless, while “in his wife” flips the knife, revealing a husband so insulated from his own aging that he can only perceive it as a change in her. It’s a gag about male narcissism disguised as marital commentary.

The intent is satirical, not sentimental. Armour is writing in a mid-century comic tradition where marriage is a battleground of small humiliations and larger blind spots. His poet’s ear sharpens the cruelty: “Middle-age” is hyphenated like a label stuck on someone, and the phrase “the time of life” adds mock formality, as if he’s defining a scientific stage. Then he punctures it with domestic pettiness. The subtext is less “wives age” than “men refuse to see themselves clearly.” She becomes his mirror, and he resents the reflection.

Context matters: Armour’s era trafficked in “nagging wife / bumbling husband” humor, but the line also exposes the gendered asymmetry underneath that comedy. Men get to treat aging as an abstract concept; women are forced to wear it as visible evidence. The wit works because it’s compact, observational, and faintly nasty - a one-line autopsy of how heterosexual culture can turn time into blame.