Marriage Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken doesn’t diagnose marital trouble so much as pronounce time of death. The line works because it drags a supposedly private, tender institution into the fluorescent cruelty of public procedure: not a “conversation,” but “evidence”; not a heart-to-heart, but an “inquest.” He’s betting that once spouses start talking about the marriage as an object, they’ve already stepped outside it. The relationship becomes a corpse on the table, and the speakers become witnesses trying to establish cause, blame, and sequence.

The barb lands with characteristic Mencken cynicism about bourgeois pieties. Early 20th-century America was busy polishing marriage into a moral display case, even as divorce rates rose and urban modernity loosened older social scripts. Mencken, the anti-sentimentalist, treats “working on the marriage” as a late-stage symptom, not a cure. His choice of “coroner” is surgical: a coroner doesn’t save lives; he explains failure after the fact. Discussion, in this framing, is less intimacy than litigation-by-other-means, the moment affection gets translated into arguments, exhibits, and competing narratives.

There’s also a sly indictment of the modern faith in rational management. If you can spreadsheet the household budget, why not spreadsheet love? Mencken’s answer is brutal: the very attempt to make marriage legible is proof it’s already stopped functioning as lived experience. The joke is cold because it’s recognizably true in miniature: once you’re debating the terms of the relationship, you’re no longer inhabiting them.