Marriage Quote by Joseph Joubert

Joubert slips a radical test for marriage into a sentence that sounds, at first blush, like polished salon advice. The pivot is the gender swap: imagine your prospective husband as a woman, then ask whether you would still want him close, not because custom tells you to, but because you actually like him. It’s a neat piece of Enlightenment-era contrarianism, using a hypothetical to pry marriage away from property, lineage, and theatrical romance and toward something sturdier: companionability.

The line also smuggles in an argument about power. In Joubert’s France, marriage was a civic arrangement as much as a private one, with women often expected to adapt to a man’s world. By framing the husband as “a friend” under altered gender conditions, Joubert pressures the reader to evaluate qualities that make friendship possible: respect, conversational equality, steadiness, basic decency. Those are traits that survive beyond youth, beauty, and the social bribery of status.

There’s a sly provocation in “if he were a woman,” too. Friendship between women was culturally legible; deep friendship between men and women was less so, often sexualized or dismissed. Joubert exploits that bias: he forces you to strip out the romantic script and see what’s left.

Still, the quote’s modern sting is double-edged. It challenges women to demand more than a provider, but it also assumes the chooser is female and the chosen is male, leaving the broader question hanging: why shouldn’t everyone apply the same friend-test to everyone? That tension is part of why it endures.