Marriage Quote by Evelyn Underhill

A quiet sting hides inside Underhill's almost domestic admission: she is less confessing a sin than diagnosing a spiritual lapse that happens to look like marriage. The line turns on the word "rousing" - interest is framed not as a spontaneous feeling but as an act of will, a small discipline. Underhill, who wrote about mysticism and attention as a form of devotion, isn’t simply regretting politeness failures. She’s naming the moral drama of fatigue: how being "tired or concerned with other things" becomes a license to let another person fade into the background.

The subtext is strikingly unsentimental. She doesn’t justify herself with a grand narrative of incompatibility or oppression; she indicts the banal forces that erode intimacy: distraction, self-absorption, the everyday tyranny of mood. Her husband’s "affairs and amusements" are not elevated into something inherently worthy. What matters is the choice to enter another person’s inner weather, even when it’s not entertaining.

Context matters here. Underhill wrote in an era when a woman’s attentiveness was often expected as duty, yet she flips the script by centering the husband's patience rather than her wifely obligation. That patience becomes the measuring rod, sharpening her awareness that love is partly an ethics of reciprocity. The sentence functions like a private examen: not a performance of marital virtue, but a record of where attention failed - and where it could, deliberately, be practiced again.