I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (19 page)

GERALD BRENAN

The best of all possible marriages is a seesaw
in which first one, then the other partner is dominant.

DR. JOYCE BROTHERS

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

G. K. CHESTERTON

Chesterton viewed the adventure with good humor, once writing: “Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.”

 

A child, like your stomach, doesn't need all you can afford to give it.

FRANK A. CLARK

Marriage is like a bank account.
You put it in, you take it out, you lose interest.

PROFESSOR IRWIN COREY

Raising children is like baking bread;
it has to be a slow process or
you end up with an overdone crust and an underdone interior

MARCELENE COX

Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty
and women their happiness.

VIRGINIE DE RIEUX

Madame de Rieux was a sixteenth-century French noblewoman and writer. Her point is that marriage is a gamble for both men and women, but they risk different things. A century later, Ben Jonson picked up the theme in
A Tale of a Tub
(1692): “I smile to think how like a lottery these weddings are.”

 

Marriage is to courting as humming is to singing.

PETER DE VRIES

De Vries also wrote: “The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds—they mature slowly.”

 

I…have another cup of coffee with my mother.
We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

JOAN DIDION

In Amy Tan's
The Kitchen God's Wife
(1991), the character Pearl also describes a complicated mother-daughter relationship: “Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.”

 

Remarrying a husband you've divorced
is like having your appendix put back in.

PHYLLIS DILLER

Comedian Larry Miller put it this way: “I don't understand couples who break up and get back together, especially couples who divorce and remarry. That's like pouring milk on a bowl of cereal, tasting it, and saying, ‘This milk is sour. Well, I'll put it back in the refrigerator; maybe it will be okay tomorrow.'”

 

The chains of marriage are so heavy
that it takes two to bear them, sometimes three.

ALEXANDRE DUMAS FILS

This is one of history's most famous justifications for a mistress. It comes from the son of a very famous father, Alexandre Dumas
père,
the author of
The Three Musketeers
and
Count of Monte Cristo.
In France, instead of using
Sr.
and
Jr., père
and
fils
are used (from the Latin;
pater,
for “father” and
filius,
for “son”).

 

The father is always a Republican to his son,
and his mother's always a Democrat.

ROBERT FROST

Husbands are like fires.
They go out when unattended.

ZSA ZSA GABOR

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.

KAHLIL GIBRAN

Children are like wet cement.
Whatever falls on them makes an impression.

HAIM GINOTT

Ginott, an Israeli with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, burst on the cultural scene in 1965 with
Between Parent and Child,
a book on parenting that remained on the best-seller list for more than a year.

 

When a woman gets married,
it's like jumping into a hole in the ice in the middle of winter;
you do it once and you remember it the rest of your days.

MAXIM GORKY

Childhood is a short season.

HELEN HAYES

The Wedding March always reminds me
of the music played when soldiers go into battle.

HEINRICH HEINE

Matrimony, the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented!

HEINRICH HEINE

The
sea of marriage
is a popular literary metaphor. In Edith Wharton's
The Age of Innocence
(1920), protagonist Newland Archer is looking at a photograph of his betrothed, the innocent and inexperienced May Welland. Just then, his thoughts turn to the exciting and unconventional Countess Ellen Olenska. He feels unsettled. Wharton writes: “The young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland's familiar features; and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.”

 

Marriage is a psychological condition, not a civil contract and a license.
Once a marriage is dead, it is dead,
and it begins to stink even faster than a dead fish.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

The concept of two people living together for twenty-five years without a
serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.

ALAN P. HERBERT

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.

A man who marries a woman to educate her falls victim to the same fallacy
as the woman who marries a man to reform him.

ELBERT HUBBARD

Wedlock is like wine—not properly judged of till the second glass.

DOUGLAS JERROLD,
on second marriages

There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage
just like the rhythm of a courtship—only backward.

You try to start again but get into blaming over and over.
Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless.
Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses.
The death occurred much earlier.

ERICA JONG

Marrying a man is like buying something
you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window.
You may love it when you get it home,
but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house.

JEAN KERR

Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck.
If you live through it,
you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left.

JEAN KERR

At every step the child should be allowed
to meet the real experience of life;
the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

ELLEN KEY

I personally am inclined to approach housework
the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.

BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases
which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.

MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

Marriage is very difficult.
Marriage is like a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, all sky.

CATHY LADMAN

Marriage is not a reform school.

ANN LANDERS

Having a baby is like trying to push a grand piano through a transom.

ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH

This may be the most famous simile on the subject of birthing (a similar version has also been attributed to Fanny Brice). Another popular one, from Carol Burnett, goes this way: “Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.”

 

A man's home may seem to be his castle on the outside;
inside it is more often his nursery.

CLARE BOOTH LUCE

American women expect to find in their husbands
the perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.

ANDRÉ MAUROIS

After the chills and fever of love, how nice is the 98.6º of marriage!

MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

Marrying is like enlisting in a war or being sentenced to a form of
penal servitude that makes the average American husband into a slave.

H. L. MENCKEN

More recently, actor James Garner reflected, “Marriage is a lot like the army; everyone complains, but you'd be surprised at the large number that re-enlist.”

 

If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse—as a man shoots himself.

H. L. MENCKEN

Mencken was one of history's great
misogamists
(marriage haters). He once wrote, “Whenever a husband and a wife begin to discuss their marriage, they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.” In 1930, he married Sara Haardt, a college professor eighteen years his junior. Given his well-known views, the marriage made headlines. Always ready with a quip, Mencken wrote: “Getting married, like getting hanged, is a great deal less dreadful than it has been made out.” Mencken finally found love, but sadly, it was not to last. His wife died of meningitis five years later.

 

Children are messengers to us from a world we once deeply knew.

ALICE MILLER

The American educator Neil Postman offered a similar thought: “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”

 

Today, while the titular head of the family may still be the father,
everyone knows that he is little more than chairman,
at most, of the entertainment committee.

ASHLEY MONTAGU

People commonly educate their children as they build their houses,
according to some plan they think beautiful, without considering
whether it is suited to the purposes for which they are designed.

MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU

Marriage is based on the theory that
when a man discovers a particular brand of beer exactly to his taste
he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery.

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

Anybody can have one kid. But going from one kid to two
is like going from owning a dog to running a zoo.

P. J. O'ROURKE

Quarrels are the dowry which married folk bring one another.

OVID

A dowry is money or personal property brought to a marriage, often in a chest or piece of baggage. This observation from Ovid's
The Art of Love
(first century B.C.) may be history's first metaphor on bringing “emotional baggage” to a marriage. Harriet Lerner said it in another way in
The Dance of Anger
(1985): “Underground issues from one relationship or context invariably fuel our fires in another.”

 

Getting married is a lot like getting into a tub of hot water.
After you get used to it, it ain't so hot.

MINNIE PEARL

Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.

J. B. PRIESTLEY

Alcoholism isn't a spectator sport. Eventually the whole family gets to play.

JOYCE REBETA-BURDITT

Marriage: a souvenir of love.

HELEN ROWLAND

A souvenir is a memento of something in the past, so this is a variation on the theme of marriage being the death of love. It comes from
Reflections of a Bachelor Girl
(1909), which also contains this simile: “Marriage is like twirling a baton, turning a hand spring, or eating with chopsticks; it looks so easy until you try it.”

 

A husband is what is left of a lover,
after the nerve has been extracted.

HELEN ROWLAND

A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere
is like a cat that goes on playing with a mouse long after she's killed it.

SAKI
(H. H. Munro)

A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.

CARL SANDBURG

Parents teach in the toughest school in the world—
The School for Making People.
You are the board of education, the principal, the classroom teacher,
and the janitor.

VIRGINIA SATIR

Marriage is like pantyhose. It all depends on what you put into it.

PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY

Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.

CHARLES M. SCHULZ,
from Linus, in a 1952
Peanuts
cartoon

Men are April when they woo, December when they wed:
maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
in
As You Like It

Combining a calendar and a weather metaphor, Shakespeare describes the changes from courtship to marriage—fresh male fervor begins to cool, and the sunny disposition of women is quickly replaced by cloudy and rainy days. Another popular calendar metaphor is the
May-December marriage,
commonly used to describe an age disparate couple, generally one in which the wife is in the spring of her life and the husband in the winter of his.

 

A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage
just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.