Marriage Quote by Dodie Smith

A polite sentence with a sharp elbow, Smith’s line is less a complaint about romance than an indictment of training. “Revolting” isn’t coy; it’s moral disgust aimed at a social script that teaches girls to treat marriage as a destination, not a relationship. The syntactic trick is the timing: minds “jump” to marriage “long before” they “jump” to love. That sequencing exposes how courtship culture can bypass desire, compatibility, even basic self-knowledge, replacing them with a checklist of security and status.

Smith’s subtext cuts two ways. On the surface, it’s a rebuke to young women’s “minds,” but the real target is the machinery that shapes those minds: families, class expectations, economic dependence, and the narrow respectable futures available to women in early- and mid-20th-century Britain. When marriage is framed as a primary career path, it makes sense that it crowds out love; love is risky, marriage is legible.

The second sentence tightens the screws: “shut to what marriage really means.” The phrase “really means” implies an unglamorous ledger - power, labor, money, sex, childrearing, social confinement - the daily governance of a woman’s life by a contract she’s been encouraged to romanticize. Coming from a dramatist, it also reads like stage direction: the curtain falls on the wedding, not on the long second act after it. Smith is puncturing the cultural habit of treating marriage as a happy ending instead of a binding arrangement with consequences.