Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage, in Stevenson's mordant framing, is not romantic closure but existential foreclosure: a contract so total it confiscates even the last private liberty, the right to opt out. The line works because it’s an exaggeration with a hard kernel of truth about Victorian respectability. Suicide isn’t invoked for melodrama; it’s the most extreme symbol of personal sovereignty. By claiming marriage takes that too, Stevenson turns the institution into a kind of social occupation force: once you’ve signed on, your body, reputation, and future are no longer purely yours.

The joke is engineered like a trap. It opens with the supposedly comforting finality of marriage - “Once you are married” - then snaps shut on “nothing left for you,” a phrase that sounds like moral accounting. The kicker, “not even suicide,” is both punchline and accusation. It suggests that society’s expectations don’t merely encourage endurance; they annex despair and make it a duty. You must live, not for yourself, but as a piece of someone else’s stability. In that sense, the target isn’t marriage as affection but marriage as institution: a mechanism for distributing responsibility, labor, and identity.

Context matters. Stevenson writes from an era when marriage reorganized legal and social personhood, especially for women, but also for men pressured into a singular role: provider, patriarch, adult. The wit is protective: a way to admit ambivalence without staging open rebellion. He’s not pleading for bachelor freedom so much as exposing how “settling down” can feel like being settled.