Wealth & Money Quote by Jackie Kennedy

It lands like a cocktail-party epigram, the kind you can laugh at without admitting how much it stings. Jackie Kennedy’s line turns marriage into a three-act negotiation with reality: first comes the romantic script, then the economic calculus, then the quiet human need not to be alone. The brilliance is its cool sequencing. Love is framed as a youthful luxury, money as the midlife correction, companionship as the late-stage truth. It’s cynical, but not cruel; the punchline isn’t that love is fake, it’s that love is rarely the only stake.

The subtext is class-coded and gendered in a way Kennedy could deploy with a straight face. For women of her era and milieu, marriage wasn’t just intimacy; it was infrastructure. Money here isn’t greed so much as security, status, insulation from scandal, and the ability to control one’s own narrative. By the time you’re choosing “companionship,” the quote implies, you’ve already learned that romance can be volatile and wealth can be transactional, so you pick the softer bargain: a person who will sit beside you through the dull parts.

Context matters because Kennedy’s public life was built on spectacle and restraint. As First Lady, she performed an idealized marriage under intense scrutiny, then endured widowhood and the ruthless economics of celebrity. Read that way, the line is less a manual than a survival note: a recognition that marriage, in the real world, is often an arrangement between desire, power, and endurance. The wit is the armor; the clarity is the confession.