I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like

by Mardy Grothe

  ’Tis just like a summer bird-cage in a garden:

  the birds that are without despair to get in, and

  the birds that are within despair…for fear they shall never get out.

  The wording is so similar to Montaigne’s that it seems indisputable that Webster had plagiarized the thought. He also might have been influenced by a 1602 poem by the English poet John Davies:

  Wedlock indeed hath oft compared been

  To public feasts, where meet a public rout;

  Where they that are without would fain go in,

  And they that are within would fain go out.

  Throughout history, a wide variety of marital metaphors have been advanced. In his 1693 play The Old Bachelor, English playwright William Congreve found an analogy between marriage and the theater:

  Courtship to marriage,

  as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.

  A prologue, of course, is an introduction to a literary work. From ancient Greece to the eighteenth century, prologues were commonly used to introduce characters and set the stage for poems as well as plays. Prologues went out of fashion in the nineteenth century and are now rarely seen. But to seventeenth-century theater-goers, the point of Congreve’s analogy was clear—compared with the drama of courtship, marriage is boring. A 1714 poem by Alexander Pope changed the metaphor but made the same point:

  They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.

  In his 1820 book Lacon, English writer Charles Caleb Colton echoes the Congreve and Pope sentiments but does so by likening marriage to a meal:

  Marriage is a feast where the grace is sometimes better than the dinner.

  In Colton’s observation, courtship is analogous to grace, and his argument is that both are often better than what is to come after them. This was history’s first marriage as a meal metaphor, and it may have stimulated two later observations:

  Marriage is a meal where the soup is better than the dessert.

  AUSTIN O’MALLEY

  Marriage is like a dull meal, with the dessert at the beginning.

  HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

  One fascinating discovery I made while researching this book was seeing how often a theme can be maintained, even though the metaphor changes:

  Marriage is a book in which the first chapter is written in poetry

  and the remaining chapters in prose.

  BEVERLEY NICHOLS

  The days just prior to marriage

  are like a snappy introduction to a tedious book.

  WILSON MIZNER

  Here, the metaphor has been changed to a book, but the message is the same: marriage is good at the beginning and gets worse over time. And in one final example, notice how the same point is made in yet another way in this old German proverb:

  Marriage is fever in reverse;

  it starts with heat and ends with cold.

  While many of the observations so far have portrayed matrimony as dull and boring, many marriages are so quarrelsome and contentious they can hardly be called unexciting. These combative marriages represent another common type of marriage, and they require another type of metaphor—marriage as war. A perfect illustration is an anonymous saying that goes back many generations:

  Marriage is the only war

  where one sleeps with the enemy.

  A more recent example surfaced in pop culture in the early nineties, just after the first Gulf War, when a character on the Murphy Brown television sitcom said:

  Marriage is the Scud missile of relationships.

  Despite the missile reference, this remark was less about war and more about the quality of marital relationships. And when you recall that many of Iraq’s Scud missiles were complete duds, the implication is clear.

  Perhaps the most famous marriage as war metaphor comes from one of history’s most famous writers, Robert Louis Stevenson:

  Marriage is like life in this—

  that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

  Stevenson is best known for adventure novels like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he was also a poet, children’s author, travel writer, and essayist. This observation comes from Virginibus Puerisque, an 1881 collection of essays in which he opined on many subjects, including matrimony. On that topic, he also wrote: “Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes.”

  One would normally think that likening marriage to war is a negative thing, but not necessarily. In her 1968 autobiography On Reflection, Helen Hayes wrote:

  Marriage is like a war.

  There are moments of chivalry and gallantry

  that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats,

  the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness,

  the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it.

  But mostly there are the long dull sieges,

  the waiting, the terror and boredom.

  Women understand this better than men;

  they are better able to survive attrition.

  Hayes, called the First Lady of the American Theater, had a career that lasted a full eighty years. She made her first stage appearance in 1905, at age five, and her last in 1985, when she played Miss Marple in a made-for-TV adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel. In the 1920s, she was having a miserable time at a New York party when she was approached by Charles MacArthur, a playwright and journalist from Chicago. He gently placed some salted peanuts into her hand and said, “I wish they were emeralds.” She was instantly smitten, and the couple were soon wed. Their marriage saw deep personal fulfillment, great professional success, and a fair amount of tragedy, including the death of their only daughter to polio. By all accounts, the couple had a legendary love affair, and they remained married until his death in 1956.

  Of all human institutions, marriage has been one of the most maligned, and many of the characterizations have been metaphorical. Some are centuries old, as when the legendary lover Giacomo Casanova wrote that “Marriage is the tomb of love.” Or when Lord Byron wrote “Though women are angels, yet wedlock’s the devil.” Many more come from recent times:

  If variety is the spice of life,

  marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.

  JOHNNY CARSON

  I always compare marriage to communism.

  They’re both institutions that don’t conform to human nature,

  so you’re going to end up with lying and hypocrisy.

  BILL MAHER

  Marriage can be viewed as the waiting room for death.

  MIKE MYERS

  While men have generally led the parade against marriage, women have also contributed many memorable observations:

  Love-matches are made by people who are content,

  for a month of honey, to condemn themselves to a life of vinegar.

  MARGUERITE BLESSINGTON

  Marriage is usually considered the grave, and not the cradle of love.

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY

  Conjugality made me think of a three-legged race,

  where two people cannot go fast and keep tripping each other

  because their two legs are tied together.

  BRENDA UELAND

  But perhaps my favorite female offering comes from the English writer Marie Corelli, a woman who is now barely remembered, even though she was the best-selling female novelist in England at the turn of the twentieth century. Once described as “the Jacqueline Susann of her time,” she wrote melodramatic and highly romanticized novels that were ridiculed by critics but devoured by a fan base that included such elite readers as Queen Victoria and Oscar Wilde. Of the hundreds of thousands of words she penned, the most famous were these:

  I never married because there was no need.

  I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband.

  I have a dog which growls every morning,

  a parrot which swears all afternoon,

  and a cat that comes home
late at night.

  So far, we’ve featured observations strictly about marriage. In the rest of the chapter you’ll find analogies, metaphors, and similes on such related topics as husbands and wives, giving birth and raising children, divorce and remarriage, parent-child relationships, and a few other aspects of home and family life.

  Marriage, in life, is like a duel in the midst of a battle.

  EDMOND ABOUT

  A divorce is like an amputation;

  you survive, but there’s less of you.

  MARGARET ATWOOD

  Wives are young men’s mistresses,

  companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.

  FRANCIS BACON

  A bachelor’s life is a fine breakfast,

  a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.

  FRANCIS BACON

  That is, young bachelors have it best, but things get worse as they age, when—recalling the prior Bacon quote—they have nobody to nurse them.

  Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse.

  ARTHUR “BUGS” BAER

  Baer was a popular sports writer and humorist in the first half of the twentieth century. When Milton Berle needed fresh material, he would take Baer to lunch at Toots Shor’s to pick his brain. Baer likely inspired a famous Berle quip: “Alimony is like putting gas into another guy’s car.”

  When you’re the only pea in the pod

  your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope diamond.

  RUSSELL BAKER, on only children

  Marriage must constantly fight against

  a monster which devours everything: routine.

  HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  This comes from Balzac’s 1829 The Physiology of Marriage, where he also wrote, “The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.”

  Divorce is the psychological equivalent

  of a triple coronary by-pass.

  MARY KAY BLAKELY

  In a happy marriage,

  it is the wife who provides the climate,

  the husband the landscape.

  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

&n
bsp; 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.