Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

Pity the married couple who expect too much from one another.

If we did not look to marriage as the principal source of happiness, fewer marriages would end in tears.

Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house.

Marriage is an attempt to solve problems together which you didn't even have when you were on your own.

I think monogamy is a little unnatural, if I'm totally honest. You change. Things alter. It's the exception rather than the rule and I think it's exceptional to cope with it and manage it. It's hard work.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

When a woman is frustrated, and it's your wife, you as the husband get that frustration.

Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage.

It's just as hard... staying happily married as it is doing movies.

Staying focused is hard work and staying married is even harder.

I've always been the type to fall in love fast and, with every boyfriend, I plan out my wedding in my head.

A man must marry only a very pretty woman in case he should ever want some other man to take her off his hands.

The problem men seem to have, and women, too, is that they have this very structured idea that we should find a partner and settle down and be, you know, faithful. And yet clearly this is really, really hard for anybody to do!

I've never really thought I'd get married. It's not that I'm suspicious of it or anything like that, it's just that I don't have a reference for it because my mum wasn't.

I hate, for example, whenever you hear someone say, 'You have work at being a couple.'

Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I'm afraid it did.

If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.

This industry is tough on relationships. I've always thought that my wife should have a credit up alongside mine because I couldn't do what I do without her support.

I can't imagine life without my wife, but I don't think you should get a prize for staying together a long time.

When I'm on a second date with a girl, I'll ask myself, 'Can I marry this person?' And we're just trying to decide between salmon and chicken.

I just thought you only need to like a person to marry him, which's quite naive.

It's easy to fall in love, but it's a lot harder to sustain love.

People often ask whether marriage has changed me. I didn't marry because I had to change.

I think the mistake some people make is they try to change the man they love after they get married. You cannot change a person.

I was really interested in how marriages work, how you can, you know, be in love with somebody and spend many years with your lives intertwined, but in the end another soul can be fundamentally unknowable. And I think that the stress of war, when one party goes away and the other has to deal at home, is a really testing time in a lot of marriages.