Elizabeth Gilbert - Marriage Quotes

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We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce, mind you. And we invented infidelity, too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.

Elizabeth Gilbert
There are always two figures in a marriage, two votes, two conflicting sets of decisions, desires and limitations.

Elizabeth Gilbert
This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories.

Elizabeth Gilbert
You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistuinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody—so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?

Elizabeth Gilbert
It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Unfenced by law, the unmarried lover can quit a bad relationship at any time. But you - the legally married person who wants to escape doomed love - may soon discover that a significant portion of your marriage contract belongs to the State, and that it sometimes takes a very long while for the State to grant you your leave.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life's expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

Elizabeth Gilbert
Every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world—that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimatesecrets of your marriage.

Elizabeth Gilbert