Marital Expectations Quotes

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.

I would be content being a housewife if I could find the kind of man who wouldn't treat me like one.

When your wife calls, you have to take it, no matter what you're doing.

The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.

Again, I shall be told that the law presumes the husband to be kind, affectionate, and ready to provide for and protect his wife. But what right, I ask, has the law to presume at all on the subject?

My wife is Dutch and very independent. She never wanted or needed to be married.

Much is said about the burdens and responsibilities of married men. Responsibilities indeed there are, if they but felt them: but as to burdens what are they?

I can't pay her back, but what I can do is make her as happy as she thought I would when we first got married.

Though Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton 11 years after Camille Hanks married Bill Cosby, and after having earned her own law degree, the terms of her marriage were also shaped in their own way by a presumption of a husband's centrality and a wife's subsidiary nature.

My husband always felt that a marriage and career don't mix. That's why he's never worked.

Among fifty percent of your married couples, the husband worries very little about what his wife is doing, provided she is doing all he wishes.

So I took an interest in politics, but I don't know whether I enjoyed it! It was a wife's duty to be interested in whatever interested her husband, whether it was politics, books, or a particular dish for dinner.

Daddy was real gentle with kids. That's why I expected so much out of marriage, figuring that all men should be steady and pleasant.

A man who doesn't make you feel special, wanted or important would make a very poor husband.

We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21).

I should have suspected my husband was lazy. On our wedding day, his mother told me: "I'm not losing a son; I'm gaining a couch."

She thought about how marvelous is would be to have a wife keeping the house in order, the meals on the table. At the same time it seemed ridiculously unfair that she could never have a wife. In fact, if she married, she would be expected to be the wife.

If they lost the incredible conviction that they can change their wives or husbands, marriage would collapse at once.

Kate had never been married, so she had no way of knowing if I was a normal husband. This has been good for our marriage.

Marriage is an arrangement by which two people start by getting the best out of each other and often end by getting the worst.

[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.

Women want certain things in marriage--the right to a title and a front seat in the lap of luxury.

The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.

People want to believe that every marriage is perfect balance but it isn't. One person always loves more deeply than the other

The days just prior to marriage are like a snappy introduction to a tedious book.