"Strange, to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and wife gazing and smiling at them"
About this Quote
Pepys catches marriage in the act of reproducing itself: not through vows or romance, but through spectatorship. The line is built like a little social trap. Married couples "gazing and smiling" look tender on the surface, yet Pepys flips the camera angle and makes their delight read as complicity. The newlywed-to-be are "poor fools", not because they are uniquely stupid, but because they are walking into a condition the observers already know from the inside. "Decoyed" is the dagger: marriage isn’t entered so much as lured into, by custom, by family machinery, by the soft coercion of public celebration.
Pepys is writing as a diarist who delights in the textures of Restoration London: crowded churches, rituals, gossip, status. The genius here is how he dramatizes the gap between public performance and private knowledge. Weddings are staged as communal joy, and married people are expected to beam approvingly. Pepys admits the darker punchline: part of that smiling is relief and schadenfreude, the pleasure of watching someone else take on the burdens you’ve already accepted, and the comfort of having your own choices normalized by fresh converts.
There’s also self-indictment. Pepys doesn’t place himself above the scene; he includes "we married people", implicating his own marriage and the era’s uneasy domestic reality. The sentence is funny because it’s true in a socially embarrassing way: institutions endure not only by promising happiness, but by turning participation into a kind of recruitment drive, with everyone pretending the bait is bliss.
Pepys is writing as a diarist who delights in the textures of Restoration London: crowded churches, rituals, gossip, status. The genius here is how he dramatizes the gap between public performance and private knowledge. Weddings are staged as communal joy, and married people are expected to beam approvingly. Pepys admits the darker punchline: part of that smiling is relief and schadenfreude, the pleasure of watching someone else take on the burdens you’ve already accepted, and the comfort of having your own choices normalized by fresh converts.
There’s also self-indictment. Pepys doesn’t place himself above the scene; he includes "we married people", implicating his own marriage and the era’s uneasy domestic reality. The sentence is funny because it’s true in a socially embarrassing way: institutions endure not only by promising happiness, but by turning participation into a kind of recruitment drive, with everyone pretending the bait is bliss.
Quote Details
| Topic | Husband & Wife |
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