Marriage Quote by Joseph Campbell

Campbell isn’t taking a cheap shot at romance; he’s disqualifying it as a foundation myth. The provocation sits in his absolutism: “all love affairs end in disappointment.” It’s not sociology so much as a rhetorical purge, a way to strip marriage of the consumer logic that treats passion as the product and a spouse as the subscription. Disappointment, in Campbell’s framing, isn’t a personal failure. It’s what happens when you ask eros to do the job of transcendence.

The line works because it reframes divorce as a category error. If you marry to preserve the fever of a “long-time love affair,” you’re marrying the chase, not the person. Campbell smuggles in his larger project here: the demotion of biography (feelings, events, drama) and the promotion of metaphysics (identity, spirit, archetype). “Spiritual identity” is deliberately vague but strategically powerful: it implies that marriage is less about being constantly fulfilled than about being initiated into a shared story, a mutual recognition that outlasts moods.

Context matters. Campbell made a career translating world myth into a modern self-help cosmology, arguing that contemporary life suffers from collapsed rituals and lost symbols. In that light, marriage becomes a ritual technology: a way to locate the self inside something larger than desire. The subtext is a critique of modern romantic expectations: we want marriage to be both fireworks and home, both adventure and insurance. Campbell’s wager is that the only durable version is the one that treats love not as a feeling to maintain but as an identity to live into.