Quotes & Sayings About Unhappiness In Marriage

Seeing unhappiness in the marriage of friends, I was content to have chosen music and laughter as a substitute for a husband. — Elsa Maxwell

One does not marry to become a judge of the spouse's behavior. If a marriage license is mistaken for a hunting license and disapproval, punishment, and threat of withdrawal of love are employed as weapons, all one bags is one's own unhappiness. — Jo Coudert

I remember saying once to my friend Susan, when my marriage was becoming intolerable, "I don't want my children growing up in a household like this." Susan said, "Why don't you leave those so-called children out of the discussion? They don't even exist yet. Why can't you just admit that you don't want to live in unhappiness anymore? — Elizabeth Gilbert

And yet. And yet. If asked - if pressed - Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It's an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone - not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, whose unhappiness seems to have no bounds, whose unhappiness is defined now by what he does not have, which is almost everything. He will always, in his mind, be the salesman who no longer has anything to sell. A man who longs for the open road but who cannot ever take it. Whereas Honora, oddly, now has more purpose than she ever did before. She is a dutiful wife who tends to her husband in spite of his weaknesses. She is a woman with ingenuity. She is a woman without illusions. She is a woman who, above all, is too busy trying to make a go of it to fret about her marriage. — Anita Shreve

Yes, many women who had pursued careers and not families experienced loneliness. But the question of whether that loneliness would be ameliorated by marriage
any marriage
was one that didn't get attention, even when another executive explained to the paper that some choices about remaining unmarried were made expressly to escape the unhappiness of an earlier generation of married women: When you think of your mother as helpless, unable to choose her own life, you become determined never to be vulnerable. — Rebecca Traister

Combining paid employment with marriage and motherhood creates safeguards for emotional well-being. Nothing is certain in life, but generally the chances of happiness are greater if one has multiple areas of interest and involvement. To juggle is to diminish the risk of depression, anxiety, and unhappiness. — Faye J Crosby

You make such beautiful poetry out of what you call your love and your unhappiness. Marriage would be such a dull affair in comparison. — Orna Ross

For most of life, nothing wonderful happens. If you don't enjoy getting up and working and finishing your work and sitting down to a meal with family or friends, then the chances are that you're not going to be very happy. If someone bases his happiness or unhappiness on major events like a great new job, huge amounts of money, a flawlessly happy marriage or a trip to Paris, that person isn't going to be happy much of the time. If, on the other hand, happiness depends on a good breakfast, flowers in the yard, a drink or a nap, then we are more likely to live with quite a bit of happiness. — Andy Rooney

We must create a marriage between the awareness of the body and that of the mind. When two parties do not cooperate, there is unhappiness on both sides. — B.K.S. Iyengar

There was not much interest in Sarah's life to draw researchers to the Berlin archives. Sarah, aware that she had something to hide, had led the way in shaping an image of herself as the most devoted of wives, and before her death she weeded out letters that friends, according to the custom of the day, returned to her. Her immediate survivors outdid her. They destroyed letters that even Sarah had preserved, perhaps to blur the intense unhappiness of the first decades of her marriage. — Lotte Hamburger

I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents. — Alain De Botton

Unhappiness is like marriage. We believe we chose it, but then it is choosing us. That is how it is, we can do nothing about it. — Albert Camus

At home, she toed the party line: "The greatest calling for a woman is to be a Catholic wife and mother." But I sensed that she hated the 1960s convention of stay-at-home motherhood. In my thirties, when my father shipped me my old Barbie-doll cases that had been sealed in storage since my mother's death, I found evidence of her unhappiness. My Barbie stuff was a mirror of her values. She never told me that marriage could be a trap, but she refused to buy my Barbie doll a wedding dress. She didn't say, "I loathe housework," but she refused to buy Barbie pots and pans. What she often said, however, was "Education is power." And in case I was too thick to grasp this, she bought graduation robes for Barbie, Ken, and Midge. — M.G. Lord

It is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable potion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness. — William Godwin

He regarded marriage as an arbitrary and essentially adversarial relationship, akin to the yoking of prisoners on the chain gang. — T.C. Boyle

The chief cause of unhappiness in married life is that people think that marriage is sex attraction, which takes the form of promises and hopes and happiness - a view supported by public opinion and by literature. But marriage cannot cause happiness. Instead, it is always torture, which man has to pay for satisfying his sex urge. — Leo Tolstoy

...mismatched attachment styles can lead to a great deal of unhappiness in marriage, even for people who love each other greatly. If you are in such a relationship, don't feel guilty for feeling incomplete or unsatisfied. After all, your most basic needs often go unmet, and love alone isn't enough to make the relationship work. — Amir Levine

Only after I faced the unhappiness of my first marriage did I start on the path of personal growth. — Judith Wright

For some people, particularly women, marriage-even an unhappy one such as this-is an escape from even greater unhappiness. — Khaled Hosseini

Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing. — Jacob M. Appel

In fact i only contemplated one thing - a happy marriage. About that i had complete self-assurance - as all my friends did. We were conscious of all the happiness that awaited us. We looked forward to love, to being looked after, cherished and admired, and we intended to get our own way in the thiggs which mattered to us while at the same time putting our husband's life, career and success before all, as was our proud duty. we didn't need pep pills or sedatives; we had belief and joy in life. We had our own personal disappointments - moments of unhappiness - but on the whole life was fun. — Agatha Christie

According to a 2014 Huffington Post article, Southern states are consistently behind the rest of the country in wages, economic mobility, education, and health care. However, they lead the country in incest, teen pregnancy, gun deaths, incarceration, poverty, obesity, intoxication, and general unhappiness. They're also still hooked on creationism, and freaked out over gay marriage. It's like evolution took a detour, crashed through a dead end sign and plunged into a swamp. But instead of calling for help, it mated with the swamp creatures and built a civilization. — Ian Gurvitz

More than any other personality trait, my mother seemed to be ruled by anger and sadness. She seemed to hate being a mother. Watching her unhappiness as I grew up made me conclude that the answer was to try and be as unemotional as I could, which many therapists have taught me is a bad idea. It also made me want to avoid marriage and having children. — Merrill Markoe

During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all the fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her smile came back. He allowed himself to believe in that smile, that brilliant counterfeit of joy — Salman Rushdie

There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose. — Charles Dickens