Marriage Quote by Samuel Richardson

Richardson slips a barb into the marriage plot and calls it prudence. The line sounds like a consoling aside to women who have fallen off the narrow track from courtship to respectable wedlock, but its real edge is aimed at men and the market that appraises them. “As men go” is the quiet dagger: husbands are not ideals, they are the available stock, and much of that stock is defective enough that missing out can count as relief.

The intent is double. On the surface, it reassures: if you’ve had lovers and still haven’t secured a husband, don’t treat it as personal ruin. Underneath, it rewrites the era’s moral arithmetic. Female sexuality is supposed to diminish “value”; Richardson hints that the bigger risk may be marriage itself, because the institution binds women legally and economically to whatever sort of man chance provides. The phrase “perhaps rather had a miss than a loss” is the language of commerce and sport, not romance: it treats matrimony as a wager women are pressured to make with imperfect information.

Context matters. Richardson’s novels are obsessed with the consequences of seduction, reputation, and the brutal asymmetry of gendered punishment. This line carries that worldliness. It admits that the culture’s promised reward - a husband as salvation - is often a bait-and-switch. The subtext is almost proto-feminist in its skepticism: the real tragedy isn’t a woman’s failure to be “chosen,” but a society that tells her being chosen is the only ending worth having, even when the chooser is, frankly, not much of a prize.