“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.”
Albert Einstein
“Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.”
Ambrose Bierce
Your Ambrose Bierce quote comes from a lovely book called _The Devil’s Dictionary_, which my parents had in their library. As a youngster, I read it cover to cover, which didn’t take all that long, and helped immunize me to various forms of stupidity; his cynical take on government, society, and commerce was right on and fits well in these modern times.
He also had a sense of humor: Clarinet, n. an instrument of torture operated by a tone-deaf torturer, which emits a sound like a pig caught under a gate. The only torture worse than a clarinet is two clarinets.” That might not be a perfect quote, but captures the sense, and has stuck with me for half a century.
Young men are very reluctant to get married these days and who can blame them? It’s a crap shoot for a guy who can be raked over the coals of family court by his former spouse and left a pauper and granted visitation ‘rights’ to see his own children depending on the whim of a stranger in robes or a hateful woman.
Here it is in a nutshell: A guy gets married, works hard, buys a house, has kids, comes home one day to be told by his wife that she’s ‘unhappy’ and has ‘needs’ that he can’t satisfy. In the divorce she gets the house, half of all his money and things, while he gets a bill for child support and alimony and has to face the government as a collection agency for her, and to decide when he can see the kids.
The stats say that a little over half of all marriages end in divorce. With odds like that, who will be willing to roll the dice?
It’s like a skydiving club offering jumps where half of the parachutes won’t open. Wowee! Where do I sign up!