Unhappy Marriage Quotes

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary

“Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary

“Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

“You kids were all in college, and I suddenly saw that I was stuck alone with a man who, all those years later, was still wanting me to be someone I wasn't.”
― Barbara Delinsky, Escape

“Monsieur, if a wife's nature loathes that of the man she is wedded to, marriage must be slavery. Against slavery all right thinkers revolt, and though torture be the price of resistance, torture must be dared: though the only road to freedom lie through the gates of death, those gates must be passed; for freedom is indispensable. Then, monsieur, I would resist as far as my strength permitted; when that strength failed I should be sure of a refuge. Death would certainly screen me both from bad laws and their consequences.”
― Charlotte Brontë, The Professor

“so far as you continue to entertain what makes you unhappy, you shall always dance to the tune of what will make you unhappy. A mindset change can cause a great change.”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“I think about it and yet I know
I’ll never be able to leave this cage
Even if the warden should let me go
I’ve lost the strength to fly away.”
― Forook Farrokhzad

“Charles's conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone's ideas filed along it in their ordinary clothes, exciting no emotion, no laughter, no reverie. He had never been curious, he said, when he lived in Rouen, to go to the theater and see the actors from Paris. He did not know how to swim, or fence, or fire a pistol, and he could not explain to her, one day, a riding term she had come upon in a novel.

But shouldn't a man know everything, excel at a host of different activities, initiate you into the intensities of passion, the refinements of life, all its mysteries? Yet this man taught her nothing, knew nothing, wished for nothing. He thought she was happy; and she resented him for that settled calm, that ponderous serenity, that very happiness which she herself brought him.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“It wasn’t an unhappy marriage? Could a marriage be happy, standing on a shaky ground of adultery and a disregard for the wife’s feelings? He didn’t say anything; he listened to her quietly.”
― Neena H. Brar, Tied to Deceit

“They weren’t happy memories because your father and I were never happy together. Even if we had been briefly and occasionally happy, everything got sullied, ripped up, and destroyed. But people don’t love each other only for happy memories. At a certain point in life, you realize that you just love the memories.”
― Natalia Ginzburg, Caro Michele

“The children of violently unhappy marriages, like my mother, are often hamstrung for life, but the children of happier marriages have problems too - all the worse, perhaps, because they don't have virtue on their side.”
― Lorna Sage, Bad Blood

“During their last years it was as if they lay on one deathbed — the dying hands interlaced by habit, by hatred of each other and love of God, the dying mouths murmuring truths without pity and complaining still.”
― Glenway Wescott, The Grandmothers: A Family Portrait

“The collapse of what once was had been comprised of dozens of gestures, scores of things left unsaid and hundreds of resentments spread over the thousand days that all stacked up to create millions of tiny moments of muffled misery.”
― Benjamin Myers, Male Tears

“The first step to self-discovery is to be honest with yourself. Never fool your subconscious.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“I said to him, "Krystal, to walk away you gotta leave something behind. I'll marry you on the condition that a wig never touch your head again." He agreed and we've been inseparable ever since. And we'll continue to be. Right, Yitzhak?”
― John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig and the Angry Inch

“You know, when there's a noise breaking into your sleep and you don't want to wake up, you can dream a long complicated dream that explains the whole noise away.”
― Amy Witting

“Changing my narrative from one of complaint and dissatisfaction to a more positive one changed my mood, but it didn’t change all the other negatives that had tipped the balance of our marital life into dysfunction. Memories of good times were a reminder that life cannot be measured in purely black and white terms. The good and bad coexist in a tenuous equilibrium that is always in flux.”
― Ranjani Rao, Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery

“Like a thermometer, love and hate also have their own degrees, there are extreme love and hate.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“Pain like trust, swings from place to place. Sometimes it is present and other times it's absent without our knowledge.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“Siddharth Gautama was truly wise, he explored all aspects of life before seeking a quiet place to rest his troubled mind. Therefore, we must allow young men and women to explore life before embracing the ascetic life.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“Finally, what good is reincarnation if you can't remember all your past lives?”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“Silence is part of the equation and not the final answer in achieving practical wisdom.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“Insanity does not take credit for responsibility.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“Self-love and selfishness go hand in hand, but in a positive way.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“Diplomacy does not mean to become soft, but to be more cunning like a fox than the normal citizen. Killing two birds with one word.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“Since man is always considered strong and courageous. The woman turned inward to exploit the man through the art of attraction and seduction.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“I shall only love my enemies on the day when the devil is forgiven all his sins. Otherwise, let's forget about it.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“[...] However, even in the early years of their marriage, when she was about 30 years old, Margery records how she told her husband she no longer wanted to have sex with him; indeed, that Jesus himself had told her not to. [...]”
― Janina Ramírez, Femina

“[...] In a rather sad and humiliating scene we see the couple celebrating Midsummer Eve in 1413. Her husband asks:

'Margery, if there came a man with a sword who would slice off my head unless I should have sex with you as I have done before, tell me the truth from your conscience — for you say you will not lie — whether you would allow my head to be sliced off or allow me to be intimate with you, like in the past?' She replies, 'Truthfully, I would rather see you be slain than that we should turn again to the impurity of sexual activity.'

She goads him further, asking why he won't try to have sex with her, even though they sleep in the same bed. He says: 'He became so afraid when he touched her that he dared not do more.' A far cry from the domineering husband we might expect from a medieval marriage. Margery adds insult to injury, explaining that she still lusts after other men but is sickened by her own husband.”
― Janina Ramírez, Femina