Marriage Quote by Neil Simon

Neil Simon can’t resist smuggling a punchline into the wedding advice, and that’s exactly the point: romance is a setup, realism is the payoff. The first two sentences sound like the kind of tidy, gendered counsel passed down at bridal showers - manage his ego, keep the domestic peace, perform the soft labor that keeps a man feeling central. Then Simon snaps the balloon with that last clause: “Like two out of every ten couples.” It’s not just a joke about divorce rates; it’s an indictment of how thin and transactional this supposed recipe is.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it offers a simple formula for marital happiness. Underneath, it exposes how absurdly low the bar can be when the expectations are rigged: if a marriage hinges on “make him feel important,” the relationship isn’t a partnership so much as a long-running production with one star and one stage manager. Simon’s comedy thrives on that tension - people desperate for order, clinging to rules that don’t match the mess of real life.

Context matters: Simon wrote in an era when mainstream American marriage scripts still leaned hard on male authority and female accommodation, even as the culture was beginning to admit how often those scripts failed. The “two out of ten” tag turns private advice into public statistics, collapsing sentiment into data. That’s Simon’s signature move: let the audience laugh, then notice they’re laughing at something bleak.