Stephanie Coontz Quotes

I'm extremely fascinated by marriage. I want to study marriage. I want to learn about it. I want to know it. I want to figure out whether or not I want to do it. I'm not just going to leap into it, because that's not good for anybody.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm not supposed to be married.

Women won't let me stay single and I won't let me stay married.

Getting married and divorced really is a learning experience.

It would take a hell of a wife to beat no wife at all.

A divorcee is a women who got married so she didn't have to work, but now works so she doesn't have to get married.

Coming from a family where the parents had been together for 40 years, you never imagine that divorce is going to happen to you.

I'm happy for people who want to get married. It's not my thing.

I'm not bothered or sad about being on my own - after all, I've never had a husband.

People's hands fascinate me. It's tempting to look at a businessman's left hand and see if there's an indentation from a missing wedding ring. Or maybe there's a tan line and the skin is pressed down where's he's worked a ring off his finger.

If you are blessed, you are blessed, whether you are married or single.

I deal with unhappy marriages a lot. I've never been married, I'm single.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

At the end of the day, I know that I would rather be alone and occasionally lonely and unhappy than in a miserable marriage and lonely and unhappy all the time. I don't mind being single. In fact, I like it.

I was married for 36 years but now I'm free.

It's always been my personal feeling that unless you are married, there is something that is not very dignified about talking about who you are dating.

Whatever their relative valuation of the single and married states, most societies in history made sharp distinctions between those who married and those who remained single: They were seen as mutually exclusive ways of life, with different legal rights and social obligations.

I'll tell you what divorce hasn't taught me. It didn't teach me not to get married again.

I would have been long divorced if I got married.

Getting divorced didn't sour me on the institution of marriage. I'll tell you what I'll never do: I'll never get divorced again.

My parents aren't married. And one of the reasons why they never got married is because they had been married before, and they liked it the way it was. They didn't feel like they needed a piece of paper to be committed. So for me, I know that marriage is not a golden ticket.

An unmarried man, in my opinion, enjoys only half a life.

I have not settled down with a life partner.

People make assumptions when you're not married. I've been best man at five weddings and I said I'd never do it again 'cos everyone got divorced.

I have no time to think about a second marriage at all.