"To us marriage is first, everything else is second"
About this Quote
“To us marriage is first, everything else is second” lands like a small act of rebellion dressed up as romance. Coming from Julie Benz, an actor whose career depends on flexibility, travel, and a constant soft audition for the next job, the line reads less like a Hallmark vow and more like a boundary statement. It’s not just prioritizing a partner; it’s declaring a hierarchy in an industry that trains people to treat work as the central relationship.
The phrasing does sly work. “To us” signals consensus, not sacrifice; it’s meant to shut down the usual narrative that one person (often the woman) is giving something up. Benz isn’t selling submission to tradition so much as mutual governance: we agreed on the order of things. That makes the sentiment feel modern even as it leans traditional.
There’s also a quiet defensiveness embedded in “first” and “second.” No one ranks priorities this explicitly unless they’ve felt those priorities challenged. Celebrity culture, with its constant schedule disruptions and public scrutiny, turns marriage into a performance category: are you “still together,” are you “balancing it all,” are you “choosing love”? Benz’s blunt arithmetic refuses the balancing act. It implies that careers, fame, even personal ambition are negotiable; the marriage isn’t.
The intent, then, is partly intimate and partly strategic: a way to protect a private life by naming it as the non-negotiable center, before the world rewrites it as a subplot.
The phrasing does sly work. “To us” signals consensus, not sacrifice; it’s meant to shut down the usual narrative that one person (often the woman) is giving something up. Benz isn’t selling submission to tradition so much as mutual governance: we agreed on the order of things. That makes the sentiment feel modern even as it leans traditional.
There’s also a quiet defensiveness embedded in “first” and “second.” No one ranks priorities this explicitly unless they’ve felt those priorities challenged. Celebrity culture, with its constant schedule disruptions and public scrutiny, turns marriage into a performance category: are you “still together,” are you “balancing it all,” are you “choosing love”? Benz’s blunt arithmetic refuses the balancing act. It implies that careers, fame, even personal ambition are negotiable; the marriage isn’t.
The intent, then, is partly intimate and partly strategic: a way to protect a private life by naming it as the non-negotiable center, before the world rewrites it as a subplot.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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