Marriage Quote by Mary Wesley

Nostalgia does a lot of work here: Wesley compresses a cultural panic into two blunt sentences that pretend to be mere observation. The first line isn’t really about effort; it’s about shame. “Try much less hard” implies a moral softening, a generation that quits. But Wesley’s phrasing is slippery on purpose. She doesn’t say marriages were happier or healthier “fifty years ago,” only that people fought longer to keep the institution intact. That distinction matters because it quietly admits the old system often ran on endurance, not intimacy.

Then she lands the real engine: “Divorce is easier.” It reads like a shrug, but it’s a diagnosis of incentives. When exit becomes accessible - legally, financially, socially - staying stops being the default. Wesley’s subtext isn’t simply anti-divorce; it’s about how institutions rely on friction to sustain themselves. Remove the friction and you discover which relationships were held together by love and which by paperwork, stigma, and the economic trapdoor, especially for women.

As a novelist, she’s attuned to what policy changes do to private life. Postwar Britain saw loosening attitudes, shifts in women’s independence, and gradual legal reforms that made divorce less ruinous. Wesley’s point is less a sermon than a narrative truth: when society stops punishing escape, people stop performing martyrdom. The sting of the line is its implied question - was the “harder trying” admirable, or just the cost of having no decent alternative?