Marriage Quote by John Updike

Updike takes the culturally loaded fact of divorce and refuses to treat it as either scandal or failure. The first clause concedes the obvious in a tone that’s almost politely clinical: “less than ideal.” That understatement matters. It swats away melodrama and opens space for a harder, quieter proposition: endings aren’t exceptions to the human story, they’re the engine of it. By invoking “under heaven,” he borrows biblical cadence to give the sentence moral gravity without slipping into sermon. It’s a novelist’s move: elevate the domestic to the metaphysical, then watch what breaks.

The subtext is a rebuke to a particularly modern superstition: that permanence is the only proof of authenticity. Updike frames that as a category error. If “temporality” invalidates, then every genuine thing-love, youth, faith, art, even life itself-fails by definition. The punch lands in the paradox of the last phrase: “nothing real succeeds.” Success, in this view, is not duration but vividness, consequence, the way an experience changes the people inside it.

Contextually, Updike is writing from a late-20th-century America where marriage is both sacred symbol and increasingly fragile institution, and where private dissatisfaction has been given public language. He’s often read as the chronicler of middle-class erosions: desire, boredom, guilt, renewal. Here he offers a kind of secular absolution-not for betrayal, necessarily, but for the fact that time does what time does. The line defends the reality of what happened, even when the outcome is a wreck.