Marriage

I am in the process of collecting fictional observations on the institution of marriage.

I don't think one has to reflect on marriage only if one is married. At a certain bare level it's an institution, a framework for organizing society and social/familial ideologies.

Thus it's important to see what folks have said about it.

A few samples:

Happiness in marriage is but a matter of chance. If the disposition of the parties are ever so well-known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always contrive to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.

---Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

---Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

A marriage is like a very sensitive virus that thrives in darkness, in the damp, airtight dungeon of secrecy. It will die upon exposure to the light.

---Karl Taro Greenfeld, Triburbia: A Novel (2012)

Marriage after all was a destination toward which all parents [...] and all daughters journeyed inevitably [...] No matter how high, how low or how middling the stature of the social orbit into which they are born—the fact of [a daughter's] marriage, taking place ideally by the age of twenty-five, becomes registered on the subconscious of both parent and child as an imminence—something that’s as universal as the biological fact of the human body.

---Sharmila Mukherjee, Green Rose: Tale of an Indian Lesbian (forthcoming)