"No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not"
About this Quote
Mencken lands the punch with a velvet glove: he frames the line as a knowing compliment to female vanity, then reveals it as an indictment of everyone in the room. The structure is almost mathematical - “no matter how happily” sets marriage up as irrelevant to desire, while “it always pleases her” pretends to offer psychological certainty. That absolutism is the joke and the weapon. Mencken doesn’t argue; he declares, because declarations sound like truths when they rhyme with prejudice.
The “nice man” is doing heavy work. Not a cad, not a brute - a socially approved admirer whose wish (“that she were not” married) is respectable enough to flatter rather than scandalize. Mencken’s subtext isn’t really about women as much as it is about the bourgeois fantasy that marriage is a finished state rather than an ongoing negotiation of status, attention, and self-image. He’s needling the sentimental story that romantic commitment cures erotic curiosity. Even “happily” becomes a setup: happiness is portrayed as compatible with wanting to be wanted elsewhere.
Context matters: Mencken, writing in early 20th-century America, made a career out of puncturing pieties - especially those surrounding sex, marriage, and moral respectability. This line fits his broader cynicism about “uplift” culture: the public worships institutions, the private self hungers for proof it could have chosen differently. The barb, of course, is gendered and reductive, but the mechanism is wider. Mencken is mocking the way admiration functions like currency, and how even the most sanctified arrangements still crave an outside bidder to confirm their value.
The “nice man” is doing heavy work. Not a cad, not a brute - a socially approved admirer whose wish (“that she were not” married) is respectable enough to flatter rather than scandalize. Mencken’s subtext isn’t really about women as much as it is about the bourgeois fantasy that marriage is a finished state rather than an ongoing negotiation of status, attention, and self-image. He’s needling the sentimental story that romantic commitment cures erotic curiosity. Even “happily” becomes a setup: happiness is portrayed as compatible with wanting to be wanted elsewhere.
Context matters: Mencken, writing in early 20th-century America, made a career out of puncturing pieties - especially those surrounding sex, marriage, and moral respectability. This line fits his broader cynicism about “uplift” culture: the public worships institutions, the private self hungers for proof it could have chosen differently. The barb, of course, is gendered and reductive, but the mechanism is wider. Mencken is mocking the way admiration functions like currency, and how even the most sanctified arrangements still crave an outside bidder to confirm their value.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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