Every estate has its traitors, so too matrimony. Naturally I do not mean the seducers, for of course they have not entered into this holy estate (I trust the mood this inquiry meets you in doesn’t cause you to smile at that expression); I do not mean those who have left it through divorce, for they have at least had the courage to be openly rebellious. No, I mean those who are rebels only in thought, who do not even dare let it be expressed in action, these wretched husbands who sit and sigh over the fact that love has long ago evaporated from their marriage, these husbands who, as you once said of them, sit like lunatics each in his matrimonial cell, and tug at the iron bars and fantasize about the sweetness of betrothal and the bitterness of marriage, these husbands who, as you rightly observe, are among those to con-gratulate, with a certain malicious glee, anyone who gets engaged. I cannot describe how despicable they appear to me, and how much unholy joy it gives me when such a husband confides in you and pours out all his sufferings, rattling off all his lies about the happy first love, and you say with a knowing look, ‘Yes, I’ll make sure not to get onto thin ice’, and he is all the more embittered that he can’t drag you with him into a common shipwreck. It is these husbands you so often refer to when you speak of a tender paterfamilias with four blessed children he would sooner see in hell.

Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard