"There is nothing like a good dose of another woman to make a man appreciate his wife"
About this Quote
Adultery, in Luce's telling, is not a tragedy but a perverse vitamin supplement for marriage: take one "dose" of novelty and suddenly the wife reads as priceless. The line works because it’s cruelly efficient. It collapses romance into pharmacology, treating desire as a chemical dependency and women as interchangeable units of experience. That cold-blooded framing is the joke, and the indictment.
As a dramatist, Luce writes with the stage in mind: a sentence that lands like a martini glass on a table. The wit is double-edged. On the surface, it flatters the wife by implying she’s superior. Underneath, it mocks the man’s moral laziness: he needs contrast, not character, to recognize value. Appreciation arrives not through intimacy or accountability but through comparative shopping. The punchline exposes a marriage economy where fidelity is less a principle than a habit vulnerable to disruption.
The gender politics are the engine. The “another woman” is reduced to a tool in a man’s self-improvement narrative, while the wife becomes the dependable product he learns to “appreciate” after a trial run. Luce, who moved in elite political and social circles and understood power’s domestic theater, is also teasing the hypocrisy of respectability: the affair isn’t framed as a scandal, but as a corrective. It’s cynicism dressed as marital advice, and that’s why it sticks: it captures a world where men’s transgressions are recast as lessons and women are expected to accept the upgraded gratitude.
As a dramatist, Luce writes with the stage in mind: a sentence that lands like a martini glass on a table. The wit is double-edged. On the surface, it flatters the wife by implying she’s superior. Underneath, it mocks the man’s moral laziness: he needs contrast, not character, to recognize value. Appreciation arrives not through intimacy or accountability but through comparative shopping. The punchline exposes a marriage economy where fidelity is less a principle than a habit vulnerable to disruption.
The gender politics are the engine. The “another woman” is reduced to a tool in a man’s self-improvement narrative, while the wife becomes the dependable product he learns to “appreciate” after a trial run. Luce, who moved in elite political and social circles and understood power’s domestic theater, is also teasing the hypocrisy of respectability: the affair isn’t framed as a scandal, but as a corrective. It’s cynicism dressed as marital advice, and that’s why it sticks: it captures a world where men’s transgressions are recast as lessons and women are expected to accept the upgraded gratitude.
Quote Details
| Topic | Husband & Wife |
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