Time & Perspective Quote by Hugh Leonard

Domestic devotion rarely looks like the movies; it looks like endurance with the volume turned up. Hugh Leonard, a dramatist with an ear for the unglamorous truth, strips marriage of its cultural cosplay - the “great love,” the “all-consuming passion” - and replaces it with something both flatter and tougher: presence. “She was just there” lands with deliberate understatement, the kind playwrights use to smuggle feeling past sentimentality. It’s almost brutal in its plainness, yet it’s the line that contains the whole marriage.

The surface narrative is bickering and disappointment, a long-running argument that never resolves into romance. The subtext is that fighting can be a form of contact: proof that the relationship remained charged enough to register, that neither person fully checked out. Leonard is also poking at the social performance of devotion. Outsiders equate love with visible gentleness, with public affection and narrative arcs. This couple didn’t “seem” devoted, but the key word is “seem” - the marriage refused to audition for its audience.

Context matters: Leonard wrote in a culture where long marriages were common, divorce carried heavier stigma, and emotional life was often described in weathered, sideways language rather than therapeutic confession. His intent isn’t to romanticize misery; it’s to defend a quieter metric of intimacy: the daily fact of someone staying. In a time that treats relationships as either soulmate epics or cautionary tales, Leonard insists on a third category - imperfect, noisy, and real enough to last.