Daily Inspiration Quote by Doug Larson

Larson lands the punchline where most marriage advice tiptoes: right in the trough. The line works because it treats “worse” not as a red-flag verdict but as a predictable season, the kind of stretch couples misread as the story’s ending. As a cartoonist, he’s compressing a whole narrative arc into a single beat - setup (“more marriages might survive”), twist (the “worse” is normal), and the sly reversal of a familiar promise (“for better or worse”) into a practical strategy: don’t panic mid-plot.

The intent is quietly corrective. Larson isn’t romanticizing endurance for its own sake; he’s mocking the modern expectation that a good relationship should feel good most of the time. His phrasing implies that many breakups are less about irreparable harm than about misinterpreting turbulence as incompatibility. “Sometimes” is doing moral heavy lifting: he’s not excusing chronic misery, abuse, or neglect. He’s targeting the everyday rough patches - money stress, childcare exhaustion, illness, boredom, the slow grind of two lives sharing a kitchen - where the dashboard lights flash and people assume the engine’s dead.

The subtext is also a critique of consumer logic applied to love: if the product disappoints, return it. Larson suggests a different literacy: marriages have weather, not just vibes. The “better” isn’t guaranteed, but it’s often sequenced, earned, and only visible to people who don’t confuse a bad chapter with a bad book.