There is no greater risk, perhaps, than matrimony, but there is nothing happier than a happy marriage. (Benjamin Disraeli, from a letter to Princess Louise on her engagement, 1870)
You all know your mother, and what a good mother she has ever been to all of you. She has been my greatest blessing and I can declare that in my whole life I have never heard her utter one word which I would rather have been unsaid. She has never failed in kindest sympathy towards me, and had borne with the utmost patience my frequent complaints of ill-health and discomfort. I do not believe she has ever missed an opportunity of doing a kind action to anyone near her. I marvel at my good fortune, that she, so infinitely my superior in every single moral quality, consented to be my wife. She has been my wise adviser and cheerful comforter throughout life, which without her would have been during a very long period a miserable one from ill-health. She has earned the love and admiration of every soul near her. (Charles Darwin, To His Sons)
Even when couples remain, as people say, in love with each other, their love is of a peaceful and patient kind. This unexpected thing happens, which one would not believe if one had not experienced it – the presence of the accustomed companion at one’s side becomes in the end an element of physical calm. Husbands do not, as a rule, care to confess it, and the wives who complain of being deserted are rare – most of us would find a renewal of our husbands’ advances rather disagreeable. But nothing is more chaste, in reality, than the majority of households; nothing in them evokes passion. Passion depends upon uncertainty and brevity in regard to time; while the hours of a married couple are inordinately long and regular. (Eugene Marcel Prevost, The Chastity of Married Life)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d. (William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116)
A very nicely curated piece, Christopher, in time for Valentine’s Day.
“Garny, old boy,” – sinking his voice to a whisper almost inaudible on the other side of the street – “take my tip. Go and jump off the dock yourself. You’ll feel another man. Give up this bachelor business. It’s a mug’s game. I look on you bachelors as excrescences on the social system. I regard you, old man, purely and simply as a wart. Go and get married, laddie, go and get married.” (P. G.Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens)