Madeline m’s Reviews > Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage > Status Update

“A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he doesn’t love her.” - Oscar Wilde

“I hoped that all this studying might somehow mitigate my deep aversion to marriage. I wasn't sure how that would happen, but it had always been my experience in the past, anyhow, that the more learned about something, the less it frightened me. (Some fears can be vanquished, Rumpelstiltskin-like, only by uncovering their hidden, secret names.)”

“I should clarify right away here that I limited my studies largely to an examination of marriage in Western history, and that this book will therefore reflect that cultural limitation. Any proper matrimonial historian or anthropologist will find huge gaps in my narrative, as I have left unexplored entire continents and centuries of human history.”

“And it did hurt. So thoroughly had I barred the very notion of marriage from my psyche that hearing the idea spoken aloud now felt shocking. I felt mournful and sucker punched and heavy and banished from some fundamental aspect of my being, but most of all I felt caught.”

MARRIAGE IS A FRIENDSHIP RECOGNIZED BY THE POLICE.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

“For one GQ article, I even went so far as to impersonate a man for a week. I cropped my hair, flattened my breasts, stuffed a birdseed-filled condom down my pants, and affixed a soul patch beneath my lower lip—all in an effort to somehow inhabit and comprehend the alluring mysteries of manhood.”

Bruh