Quotes & Sayings About Unhappy Marriage

An unhappy marriage is neither your business nor your concern. — Anthony Riches

They could play married, both happy and unhappy, like no other acting couple have ever played married. They're the Lunts of the American marriage movie. — Jeanine Basinger

Stop treating your creativity like it's a tired, old, unhappy marriage (a grind, a drag) and start regarding it with the fresh eyes of a passionate lover. Even if you have only fifteen minutes a day in a stairwell alone with your creativity, take it. Go hide in that stairwell and make out with your art. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I find to my astonishment that an unhappy marriage goes on being unhappy when it is over. — Rebecca West

An unhappy gentleman, resolving to wed nothing short of perfection, keeps his heart and hand till both get so old and withered that no tolerable woman will accept them. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

As married people, we dwell on a spectrum between happy and unhappy, in love and out of love, and we move back and forth on that line decade by decade, year by year, week by week, even hour by hour. — Ada Calhoun

... for I look upon the Frasers to be about as unhappy as most other married people. — Jane Austen

I've always been suspicious of TV, I've always found music and video to be an unhappy marriage. — Keith Richards

I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything. — Sylvia Plath

Married women are far more depressed than married men
in unhappy marriages, three times more; and
interestingly
in happy marriages, five times more. In truth, it is men who are thriving in marriage, now as always, and who show symptoms of psychological and physical distress outside it. Not only their emotional well-being but their very lives, some studies say, depend on being married! — Dalma Heyn

No happy marriage was, in his estimation, ever based on thoughtless, automatic untruths and exclusions. And the best way to make someone unhappy, if not downright unbalanced, is to tell her that what she sees with her own eyes is not there at all. — Catherine Ryan Hyde

I thought women enjoyed affairs. I thought they got sparks of pleasure at the buzz of their phone, thought they ran around with a glow, their world suddenly on fire with new love. I thought they were women with terrible husbands and unhappy lives, an affair the first step in an eventual ending of their marriage. I thought that they were horrible, selfish women. I never thought that I would be one of them. I never thought that I'd be so weak. It turned out being the perfect wife was only easy when there was no temptation, no mistake haunting and overshadowing your marriage. — Alessandra Torre

It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished. — Fulton J. Sheen

If this mentality has so pervaded our decision making, then it stands to reason that it is also affecting our search for a romantic partner, especially if it's going to be long-term. In a sense, it already has. Remember: We are no longer the generation of the "good enough" marriage. We are now looking for our soul mates. And even after we find our soul mates, if we start feeling unhappy, we get divorced. — Aziz Ansari

Those who have made unhappy marriages walk on stilts, while the happy ones are on a level with the crowd. No one sees 'em! — Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate. W. H. Auden — Gary L. Thomas

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, 'God, this is fascinating!' — Jane Smiley

Progress of a marriage: There was a time when you couldn't make me happy. Now the time has come when you can make me unhappy. — Irving Layton

When a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby's health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn't yet received enough education. She may want a child badly but in a few years, not now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child. — Steven D. Levitt

Arik and Cadie always knew they wouldn't be one of those couples that let problems between them fester. They would immediately address any issues that arose, bring them out into the open, discuss them until they reached a mutually satisfactory conclusion. They felt bad for some of the Founders who they believed had unhappy marriages - couples who were not strong enough to be truthful and open with each other, and even worse, with themselves — Christian Cantrell

I have a very happy marriage and friends who keep my feet on the ground. But looking for satisfaction in life is difficult. Maybe being happy is as simple as not being unhappy. — Jasper Carrott

It's the same girl-who-has-everything story. You know, the one where she's insecure and scared and unhappy and has marriage problems and doesn't know how to handle stardom and screws up right and left and gets in with the wrong people and goes down the drain. — Natalie Cole

The thing is, when I had my first success it did coincide with the end of my first marriage, and because I went on to have a very, very unhappy two years, I don't think I equate career success with personal happiness. — Rob Brydon

Never speak of marriage as an achievement. Find ways to make clear to her that marriage is not an achievement, nor is it what she should aspire to. A marriage can be happy or unhappy, but it is not an achievement. We condition girls to aspire to marriage and we do not condition boys to aspire to marriage, and so there is already a terrible imbalance at the start. The girls will grow up to be women preoccupied with marriage. The boys will grow up to be men who are not preoccupied with marriage. The women marry those men. The relationship is automatically uneven because the institution matters more to one than the other. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The best marriages, like the best lives, were both happy and unhappy. There was even a kind of necessary tension, a certain tautness between the partners that gave the marriage strength, like the tautness of a full sail. You went forward on it. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It is lack of communication that leads to unhappy marriage. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Marriage is tough, because it is woven of all these various elements, the weak and the strong. "In love-ness" is fragile for it is woven only with the gossamer threads of beauty. It seems to me absurd to talk about "happy" and "unhappy" marriages. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

When you're unhappy in your marriage, your children are the ones who suffer. — Christina Aguilera

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

It's not marriage that I crave. Many of my friends who have married are pretty miserable. Within a year and a half, most of them are either unhappy or divorced. — Ben Elliot

You kids were all in college, and I suddenly saw that I was stuck alone with a man who, all those years later, was still wanting me to be someone I wasn't. — Barbara Delinsky

How did so many women get to this unhappy place of not understanding how truly "simple" men are in their requirements and how much benevolent power their wives have over them? Why did notions like assuaging "male ego" and using "feminine wiles" rocket into disrepute? How is it that so many women are angry with men in general yet expect to have a happy life married to one of them?
There are a number of reasons for this, and I believe they all revolve around the assault upon, and virtual collapse of, the values of religious morality, modesty, fidelity, chastity, respect for life, and a commitment to family and child-rearing. — Laura C. Schlessinger

Do I think a marriage with him would last? I have my doubts. There, I said it. But marraige is always a risk. And so what if it doesn't work? Would that make you absolutely unhappy for the rest of your life? I would hope not. — Amy Stolls

He had never been an unhappy man; his own temper had secured him from that, even in his first marriage; but his second must shew him how delightful a well-judging and truly amiable woman could be, and must give him the pleasantest proof of its being a great deal better to choose than to be chosen, to excite gratitude than to feel it. He — Jane Austen

An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do. — Jane Austen

Divorce Myths: 1. When love has gone out of a marriage, it is better to get divorced. 2. It is better for the children for the unhappy couple to divorce than to raise their children in the atmosphere of an unhappy marriage. 3. Divorce is the lesser of two evils. 4. You owe it to yourself. 5. Everyone's entitled to one mistake. 6. God led me to this divorce. — R.C. Sproul

So I will just tell you I love you. I love you, Bram. I want everyone to see it, and I want you to know . . . you're a part of this place now. No matter where duty takes you, Spindle Cove will always be here for you. And so will I." He put both arms around her, pulling her flush against his chest. "You beautiful, brazen thing." Then he went silent, just holding her gaze for what seemed like eons. Nerves multiplied in her stomach with every passing second. She swallowed hard. "Don't you have anything else to say?"" 'Hallelujah' springs to mind. Beyond that . . ." He brushed a caress down her cheek. "Does this mean that if I proposed marriage to you right now, you might not make that twisty, unhappy face?" "Try me and see. — Tessa Dare

The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest. — Anne Tyler

And I know, with the newfuond clarity of being in a relationship myself, that my own parents were never happy together, and probably never would have been, whatever the circumstances — Christina Baker Kline

It's like picking the place you're going to live for the next fifty years by using a wall map, a blindfold, and what you really, truly, deeply believe is your lucky dart.' Sullenly Judith said, 'I don't believe I have a lucky dart,' and her mother cast an unhappy smile her way and said, 'You will, though. — Tom McNeal

So many pleasing episodes of one's life are spoiled by shouting. You never heard of an unhappy marriage unless the neighbors have heard it first. — Lillian Russell

What's killing him is the idea that I will die unhappy, in a miserable marriage. He hates that my life isn't ending on a good note ... So I told him that he's a good man and was the love of my life, both of which are true. I tried to tell him all the things I hadn't told him before ... Mostly, I wanted him to understand the real reason I'd thought our marriage was over. It was over because we forgot to stay in love. Both of us. — Marisa De Los Santos

Impossible for anyone to conceive the torments of his nights in bed with his beloved one and estranged from her. That turning of backs, that cold space between their two unhappy bodies. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Monsieur, if a wife's nature loathes that of the man she is wedded to, marriage must be slavery. Against slavery all right thinkers revolt, and though torture be the price of resistance, torture must be dared: though the only road to freedom lie through the gates of death, those gates must be passed; for freedom is indispensable. Then, monsieur, I would resist as far as my strength permitted; when that strength failed I should be sure of a refuge. Death would certainly screen me both from bad laws and their consequences. — Charlotte Bronte

Divorce isn't such a tragedy. A tragedy's staying in an unhappy marriage, teaching your children the wrong things about love. Nobody ever died of divorce. — Jennifer Weiner

She's probably afraid you'll turn out like her and be married to someone you can't stand. — Jennifer Brown

The children of violently unhappy marriages, like my mother, are often hamstrung for life, but the children of happier marriages have problems too - all the worse, perhaps, because they don't have virtue on their side. — Lorna Sage

The flinch is your real opponent, and information won't help you fight it. It's behind every unhappy marriage, every hidden vice, and every unfulfilled life. Behind the flinch is pain avoidance, and dealing with pain demands strength you may not think you have. — Julien Smith

Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves! — Fulton J. Sheen

Three-fourths of all marriages are unhappy. — Francoise D'Aubigne, Marquise De Maintenon

The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved. — Rebecca West

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears. — C. G. Jung

But I had not quite fixed whether to make him [Don Juan] end in Hell-or in an unhappy marriage,-not knowing which would be the severest. — Lord Byron

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

It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both. — Guy De Maupassant

There are times when we can be so annoyed at each other, Elliot, and we yell at each other. But when push comes to shove, we let it go, and we're back to our normal selves, because being unhappy is part of being happy. When two people get married, they say two people become one. No, I don't agree. Two people should remain two people but walk side by side. I've not become Elliot. Elliot has not become Hunny. We remain Hunny and Elliot. And to me, that's important. — Dave Isay

Every divorce is the result of selfishness on the part of one or the other or both parties to a marriage contract. Someone is thinking of self comforts, conveniences, freedoms, luxuries, or ease. Sometimes the ceaseless pin pricking of an unhappy, discontented, and selfish spouse can finally add up to serious physical violence. Sometimes people are goaded to the point where they erringly feel justified in doing the things that are so wrong. Nothing of course justifies sin. — Spencer W. Kimball

Charles's conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone's ideas filed along it in their ordinary clothes, exciting no emotion, no laughter, no reverie. He had never been curious, he said, when he lived in Rouen, to go to the theater and see the actors from Paris. He did not know how to swim, or fence, or fire a pistol, and he could not explain to her, one day, a riding term she had come upon in a novel.

But shouldn't a man know everything, excel at a host of different activities, initiate you into the intensities of passion, the refinements of life, all its mysteries? Yet this man taught her nothing, knew nothing, wished for nothing. He thought she was happy; and she resented him for that settled calm, that ponderous serenity, that very happiness which she herself brought him. — Gustave Flaubert

I like marriage, family life and I wish to get married again. But opting out of an unhappy marriage was a duty toward myself & my future. — Rossana Condoleo

If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness. — Sigmund Freud

I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.
But he never liked anyone who
our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her.
Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight. — Virginia Woolf

Show me one couple unhappy merely on account of their limited circumstances, and I will show you ten who are wretched from other causes. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If we must lose wife or husband when we live to our highest right, we lose an unhappy marriage as well, and we gain ourselves. But if a marriage is born between two already self-discovered, what a lovely adventure begins, hurricanes and all. — Richard Bach

Love her or some other guy will.
Love like there is no tomorrow, cause there may not be.
Never take what/who you have for granted cause it will end up turning into something you had.
Do what it takes to keep her happy at any cost to you're pride.
Treat her like she is you're queen & She will make you feel like a king.
Love lost is more painful than an unhappy marriage. — Mitch Albom

Women are unhappy in their marriages because they want men to be more related than most men know how to be. And men are unhappy in their marriages because their women seem so unhappy with them. — Terrence Real

She's not happy in her marriage. Not unhappy exactly, but not happy. He doesn't want kids, so that's nothing to look forward to. Her life is chock-full of quiet tedium. Suddenly, she falls in love. And sure, there's the excitement of being with her lover, but there's also the excitement of not being with him. Of waiting and going on with her ordinary life. And all that dullness now becomes part of the drama. Because that's her cover story. All the dreary anguish and monotony that fills ninety-eight percent of her life is electrified with meaning, since it now serves as the perfect camouflage to hide the two percent of passion. And, yes, she felt guilt and, yes, she felt shame. But those are powerful emotions too, and were all part of the glorious transformation of a featureless bland life into an adventure. — Phoef Sutton