"The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character"
About this Quote
De Vries slips the knife in with a smile: marriage doesn’t fail because love is fragile, but because love is often miscast. “Personality” is the sparkly storefront - charm, humor, the curated self that performs well in the dating light. “Character” is the back office - habits, ethics, emotional stamina, the way someone handles boredom, money, resentment, illness. The line works because it turns romance into a category error: we think we’re choosing a person, but we’re really choosing a lifelong pattern.
The subtext is almost cruelly domestic. Courtship rewards personality: it’s episodic, high-effort, optimized for surprise and agreement. Marriage is sustained exposure. It tests not whether someone can be delightful, but whether they can be decent on an ordinary Tuesday, and whether their private self aligns with the public one. De Vries isn’t simply warning against being fooled; he’s suggesting we collude in the illusion, preferring a vivid surface to the slower, harder-to-read evidence of character.
Context matters: mid-century American life sold marriage as both social duty and personal fulfillment, a neat narrative that didn’t leave much room for ambivalence. De Vries, a novelist with a satirist’s ear for self-deception, punctures that sales pitch in one sentence. He also leaves a quiet indictment hanging in the air: if you “must live with” character, then character is what endures when desire stops auditioning. The joke lands because it’s true, and because it admits how predictable our surprise can be.
The subtext is almost cruelly domestic. Courtship rewards personality: it’s episodic, high-effort, optimized for surprise and agreement. Marriage is sustained exposure. It tests not whether someone can be delightful, but whether they can be decent on an ordinary Tuesday, and whether their private self aligns with the public one. De Vries isn’t simply warning against being fooled; he’s suggesting we collude in the illusion, preferring a vivid surface to the slower, harder-to-read evidence of character.
Context matters: mid-century American life sold marriage as both social duty and personal fulfillment, a neat narrative that didn’t leave much room for ambivalence. De Vries, a novelist with a satirist’s ear for self-deception, punctures that sales pitch in one sentence. He also leaves a quiet indictment hanging in the air: if you “must live with” character, then character is what endures when desire stops auditioning. The joke lands because it’s true, and because it admits how predictable our surprise can be.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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