"The secret of a good marriage is forgiving your partner for marrying you in the first place"
About this Quote
A joke that flips marital advice on its head, the line shifts blame and virtue in the same breath. Rather than urging patience with a partner’s flaws, it asks you to forgive them for the reckless kindness of choosing you. The humor is self-deprecating, but the ethic is serious: humility is the solvent of resentment. If both partners treat themselves as the risky choice the other bravely made, it becomes easier to be generous, to laugh at friction, and to see everyday irritations as the small price of a love that knowingly took a gamble.
The epigram also pokes at romantic idealism. Courtship exaggerates our charms; marriage reveals the mundane and messy. To say one forgives the other for marrying them is to acknowledge the illusions that accompany beginnings and the steady work that follows. Forgiveness here is not absolution for grand betrayals but an attitude of ongoing mercy for human limitation, including one’s own. It turns the marriage from a ledger of grievances into a shared joke about mutual imperfection, a stance that makes intimacy more supple and enduring.
Sacha Guitry built a career on such sparkling inversions. A playwright, actor, and filmmaker of early 20th-century Paris, he specialized in boulevard comedies where matrimony, vanity, and infidelity are toyed with rather than condemned. He married multiple times and wrote with the practiced wit of someone who knew both the allure and the absurdity of vows. The line fits his world of elegant repartee: aphorisms that puncture solemnity while smuggling in wisdom. Beneath the quip lies a practical secret: gratitude disguised as irony. To forgive your partner for marrying you is to remember that love is a gift you do not quite deserve, and to meet that gift with grace. A marriage that starts from that joke may find that its humor matures into tenderness.
The epigram also pokes at romantic idealism. Courtship exaggerates our charms; marriage reveals the mundane and messy. To say one forgives the other for marrying them is to acknowledge the illusions that accompany beginnings and the steady work that follows. Forgiveness here is not absolution for grand betrayals but an attitude of ongoing mercy for human limitation, including one’s own. It turns the marriage from a ledger of grievances into a shared joke about mutual imperfection, a stance that makes intimacy more supple and enduring.
Sacha Guitry built a career on such sparkling inversions. A playwright, actor, and filmmaker of early 20th-century Paris, he specialized in boulevard comedies where matrimony, vanity, and infidelity are toyed with rather than condemned. He married multiple times and wrote with the practiced wit of someone who knew both the allure and the absurdity of vows. The line fits his world of elegant repartee: aphorisms that puncture solemnity while smuggling in wisdom. Beneath the quip lies a practical secret: gratitude disguised as irony. To forgive your partner for marrying you is to remember that love is a gift you do not quite deserve, and to meet that gift with grace. A marriage that starts from that joke may find that its humor matures into tenderness.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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