Marriage Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken doesn’t just roast marriage; he weaponizes arithmetic to make cynicism sound like common sense. “Strike an average” is the key move: it borrows the authority of measurement, as if romantic illusion and marital disenchantment are data points on a chart. The joke lands because it flatters the reader’s suspicion that “truth” is less a revelation than a correction - a number you get only after you subtract the fantasies.

The subtext is pure Mencken: courtship is a propaganda campaign, marriage is the audit. A month before the wedding, the husband is seen through the soft-focus lens of desire, social pressure, and the bride’s own investment in the story she’s about to publicly commit to. A year later, the lens swings to another distortion: proximity, routine, and disappointment sharpen perception, but also invite its own melodramas. Mencken’s “truth” isn’t the husband as he is; it’s the husband as refracted through two predictable phases of belief.

There’s also a sly jab at the modern faith that private life can be decoded with a neat formula. Mencken, a leading skeptic of American pieties, treats matrimony as one more institution built on comforting myths and then sustained by complaint. The line’s cruelty is calibrated: it pretends to be balanced, even fair-minded, while implying that neither devotion nor resentment is reliable - only the midpoint between them feels “real.” That’s the punch: truth arrives, not as romance or bitterness, but as a compromise between self-deception and post-honeymoon clarity.