Marriage Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis smuggles a battlefield into the domestic. “Hidden or flaunted” makes the conflict between men and women feel both inevitable and theatrical: sometimes it’s the quiet, habitual resentment nobody names; sometimes it’s open warfare, performed as principle. The “sword” isn’t just libido or power or pride. It’s the underlying asymmetry built into courtship, gender expectation, and the fear of being used or diminished by the person you most need. By choosing a medieval object, Lewis invokes chivalric myth while puncturing it. Romance promises fusion; he insists on sharp edges.

The line also carries Lewis’s Christian anthropology: the sexes are complementary, but not naturally harmonious. Modern readers may balk at that framing, yet the rhetorical move is clever. He refuses the easy story that marriage is simply the formalization of love; it is an arena where two competing selves negotiate a truce. “Till an entire marriage” is the sting. Not the wedding, not the honeymoon, not the first crisis, but the long, grinding totality of shared life. Reconciliation is presented as a completed work, not a vibe.

Context matters. Lewis wrote in a mid-century Britain still structured by rigid gender roles, with marriage pitched as moral ballast after war. The sentence reads like pastoral realism with a blade of pessimism: affection doesn’t cancel rivalry; it disciplines it. Lewis’s intent is partly cautionary (don’t sentimentalize), partly aspirational (a whole marriage can, slowly, turn weapons into tools).