Marriage Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence builds a little domestic cathedral, then immediately lets the roof leak. The first sentence arrives like a manifesto: “whole working philosophy,” “only stable happiness,” “mankind.” He’s not describing a preference so much as trying to legislate a salvation story, where the cure for modern malaise is a heterosexual marriage fused at every level: “intimacy, physical and psychical.” That pairing is classic Lawrence: the body isn’t a guilty afterthought but a spiritual instrument, and the mind without sex is a hollow machine. The phrase “blessed union” borrows religious authority to sanctify desire, recasting erotic life as sacrament rather than vice.

The subtext, though, is less sermon than self-defense. By universalizing his need - making it “for mankind” - he smuggles personal obsession into ethical principle. “Woman-kind” is tellingly abstract, a category elevated and flattened at once: women become both holy counterpart and symbolic fuel for male wholeness. That’s the Lawrence paradox: he venerates women while positioning them as the answer to a male crisis.

Then comes the quiet pivot: “I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.” The stiffness of “I wish to add” signals damage control, as if he knows the previous certainty is vulnerable. The admission doesn’t undo the doctrine; it makes it believable. Lawrence’s genius is that he can’t resist the absolute, but he can’t sustain it either - desire as religion, marriage as cure, and the nagging fact that the cure still hurts.