Marriage Quote by Marge Piercy

Piercy lands the joke with a feminist’s precision: humans call it “sleeping together” to launder sex and commitment into something coy, while cats treat literal proximity as a binding contract. The line is funny because it treats euphemism as a kind of social fraud. We dress up our intimacy in language that keeps it deniable, negotiable, unaccountable. Cats, meanwhile, don’t bother with plausible deniability. If they’re on your bed, you’ve been claimed.

The subtext is about how culture manages closeness. In a world where relationships are policed by etiquette and reputation, euphemism becomes a technology of control: it lets people participate in desire while pretending they’re above it. Piercy, whose work often insists on naming what polite society prefers to blur, flips that dynamic. She suggests the animal version is cleaner, even if it’s absurdly imperial. With cats, “sleeping together” isn’t a hint or a euphemistic alibi; it’s jurisdiction.

There’s also a sly critique of romantic institutions. Marriage is supposed to formalize devotion, but Piercy implies that what actually creates permanence is the mundane choreography of shared space: bodies, routines, the nightly negotiation of who gets the pillow. Cats distill that truth into pure behavior. They don’t propose; they occupy.

Contextually, it fits Piercy’s broader project: puncturing the sentimental scripts around love and domesticity, and reminding us that intimacy is less a declaration than a practice. The cat joke is the sugar that helps the sharper medicine go down.