"Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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