Life & Wisdom Quote by Elbert Hubbard

A college marriage, in Hubbard's telling, isn't youthful romance so much as a resume stain - proof, delivered early, that you're capable of committing to the wrong thing with full confidence. The line works because it borrows the voice of practical advice and then twists the knife: "a start" becomes a pun that collapses two versions of adulthood into one another, the private leap into partnership and the public scramble for employability. It's not just a joke about matrimony; it's a joke about how thoroughly the labor market claims the right to judge your character.

Hubbard, a turn-of-the-century American moralist with a salesman’s instinct for punchy aphorism, lived in a moment when "getting a start" meant entering a rapidly professionalizing economy with increasingly standardized pathways. He also trafficked in the era's gendered assumptions: college is framed as a launching pad for men, while marriage is treated as an impulsive detour - or a trap - that a rational employer would read as poor judgment. The punchline flatters the employer as a kind of omniscient evaluator, turning hiring into moral audit.

The subtext is cynical and bracing: institutions don't care what your choice means to you; they care what it signals to them. By recasting love as "one mistake", Hubbard isn't offering relationship wisdom. He's satirizing the puritanical, status-obsessed culture that treats commitment as liability unless it advances your economic narrative. The laugh lands because the cruelty is recognizably social, not merely personal.