Marriage Quote by Mary Wesley

A five-year indecision isn’t just a marital quirk here; it’s a tempo problem, a life stalled by dithering. Wesley’s punchline is the cheerful, almost offhand solution: she doesn’t fight the paralysis head-on, she routes around it. The line lands because it’s both affectionate and ruthless. “I used to get him to think” carries the sly admission of manipulation, softened by domestic familiarity. She’s not presenting herself as a martyr; she’s presenting herself as an operator.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of a certain kind of male authority: the man who must be the author of every decision, even if he can’t actually decide. Wesley spots the hypocrisy and converts it into a system. By letting him “think that whatever course of action… was his idea,” she preserves his ego while reclaiming forward motion. The “Then he’d go right ahead” is devastatingly efficient: once his identity is attached to the plan, action becomes possible. The obstacle wasn’t judgment, it was ownership.

Context matters: Wesley wrote with a dry, socially observant English realism sharpened by long experience of class, marriage, and the backstage negotiations that keep households functioning. The humor isn’t decorative; it’s a survival strategy. It sketches an entire power dynamic in two sentences: autonomy disguised as deference, competence practiced in the shadows, and the brittle fragility of a masculinity that needs credit more than it needs truth.