Making fun of famous quotes about marriage, family, & home life

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everybody and welcome back. My name is Courtney, I am here with my spouse, Royce, and together we are The Ace Couple. And we are digging back into Oxymoronica today. Last time we dove into this book, we commented on oxymoronic quotes pertaining to sex, love and romance. And, as promised, we are going to plow on forward with quotes about marriage, home and family life.

Royce: So everyone, prepare for the boomer humor.

Courtney: See, I was thinking about that after our last episode, because you call it Boomer Humor, I’ve heard lots of other people our generation and younger call it boomer humor. But it’s really been around so much longer than that.

Royce: It is. Yeah.

Courtney: Like so many of these quotes from like Lord Byron are just older English ways of saying the things that we’d consider to be boomer humor.

Royce: Yeah, I’m prepared for: marriage sucks, home sucks, life’s sad.

Courtney: “I hate my spouse, actually.” Yeah, that’s– That’s definitely what I’m prepared for too. Because I mentioned in the last episode that some of the quotes obviously are very, very old, some of them are more modern, and there was a moment where I got to thinking. Because I was saying like, I wish some of these had more specific years, because some of them are clearly older, some are newer, some are anonymous and aren’t necessarily attributed to a year, but all of these quotes are over 20 years old because the book itself was published in 2004.

Courtney: So, that’s important context. So, there’s absolutely nothing newer than that. So we definitely know even the most modern quotes in here are still probably from the 90s or earlier. And that context is important because, for as much as it’s a type of humor and mindset that is far older than the boomer generation, I think the reason why we started calling it Boomer Humor is because the generations after have been slowly stripping away this what was once thought to be common knowledge or conventional wisdom. But I didn’t even realize this, but I just mentioned the Lord Byron quotes, this chapter also opens with another Lord Byron quote, 1814: “I am about to be married and am, of course, in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.”

Royce: I just had to check how many marriages Lord Byron had, but he died at 36, so that [Courtney laughs] that limited the numbers. But I do see one spouse married in 1815, separated in 1816.

Courtney: Amazing. So this is probably the one he’s talking about. See, I feel like boomer humor just doesn’t cut it. We should have a phrase based off of Lord Byron. Like, what do we call this, Byrony Irony?

Royce: Byrony is better than like a byronism.

Courtney: [laughs] A byronism. Yeah, I like Byrony Irony. And I mean irony, of course, in the Alanis Morissette way, where it’s– it’s not actually ironic, it’s all just unfortunate. So then it goes on. The author talks about how, oh, marriage actually means lonely. And here are all these quotes to back it up, such as– Oh, this one is from Anton Chekhov, the one who has the famous gun. “If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.” Are quotes like this before getting married? Like this byrony irony we have of like: I’m miserable as I’m about to get married because that’s supposed to make me happy? Is that just Chekhov’s divorce? Like– we know the marriage didn’t last, and who could have guessed? Even Gloria Steinem got in on this: “The surest way to be alone is to get married.” And even this quote that says, “Marriage is lonelier than solitude.”

Courtney: Now here’s the thing: I hate all of these quotes and I disagree with them entirely. And I think at least with Lord Byron, like, that marriage didn’t work. That’s a historical fact that we know about. And you read a quote like that and you’re like, yeah, of course it didn’t work. You clearly did not like this woman. You clearly did not like the concept of marrying this person. And without additional context, it is so easy for me to default to that is what’s going on. Like you just don’t like your spouse, you just didn’t actually want to get married, but for whatever societal purpose you did. And I think maybe that’s just why I don’t like quotes in general, but there are very specific situations where I can be okay with this concept being used. But I guess I need more context and I need it to be done more artfully. Because this isn’t to say that writing or quotations or poetry can’t be art, because obviously they can be, but if it’s just an out of context quote from one person. It just kind of feels like one person complaining.

Courtney: However– And actually, Royce, I was just talking to you about this like a half an hour ago, about how I might want to do an episode about a fabulous new musical called Maybe Happy Ending. I am a little bit obsessed with it right now. And there’s actually an entire song in that musical that is kind of these vibes in a way that I’m not that mad about. Because there’s a line in a song, the lyric is: “When you’re in love, you are the loneliest. You’re only half when one is what you were.” And it’s a beautiful song, it’s a beautiful musical. Contextually, I think it works. And that’s putting a spin on being lonely that isn’t: “I don’t actually want to get married. We aren’t actually connected. This isn’t what love should feel like. I hate this person, actually.” That’s more of a like, “I love this person so much that it’s painful to be removed from them.” But I don’t know anyone who would read one of these quotes like marriage is lonelier than solitude and be like, “Wow, they love each other so much. They clearly have a healthy relationship.”

Royce: So I also wondered, with a lot of these quotes being further back in time, I think last episode we were talking about divorce rates.

Courtney: Yeah.

Royce: And how there’s the old saying about it being, basically, you know, half of all marriages end in divorce, and how that statistic is not presented properly and there are a lot of different factors. Quoting someone from the 1800s, my first thought was was this some kind of arranged marriage? Considering this was a barren. And I did do a little bit more reading, and Lord Byron’s one year marriage partially failed because he was involved with a number of women at the time – previously, during, and after – and it does seem like his– the one marriage that is on the books was like family pressured into. And that may have been why he was miserable about it.

Courtney: I mean Lord Byron also, like, he’s the one who’s known for, like, keeping locks of his lover’s pubic hair. So that’s– I mean, that’s an unfortunate fact.

Royce: Well, I am curious, you mentioned at the beginning of the episode this isn’t just boomer humor, it’s been around for a while. I wonder where the origin of this was, and did it come from a time and from a lot of people who were being forced into marriages that they didn’t want to be in? And then somehow that commentary just became the social commentary or the– the ongoing joke?

Courtney: Yeah, like, “Haha. I grew up hearing my parents and grandparents saying these things. I grew up hearing everyone say these things. So once I got into a marriage that I chose myself and was still miserable, this is just how marriage is supposed to be.” But yeah, then these quotes start evolving into the like, you’ll be miserable if you don’t get married, but you’ll be miserable if you do. Like: “It may be compared to a cage. The birds without try desperately to get in and those within try desperately to get out.” On a literal level, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a bird desperately trying to get into a cage before.

Royce: Only if there’s food in it.

Courtney: I suppose. “One was never married, and that’s his hell. Another is, and that’s his plague.” “Matrimony and bachelorhood are both of them at once equally wise and equally foolish,” Samuel Butler. And then, oh, we’ve got one from Socrates: “It doesn’t matter whether you decide to marry or stay single. Either way you’ll be sorry.”

Royce: So we’re going way back on that one, assuming that is actually an accurate quote, because there are a lot of misquotes that are printed in books.

Courtney: Oh, absolutely. But yeah, some of these do go way, way back.

Royce: I just did a quick search, and I also have no idea if this is a real Socrates quote, but I did find: “By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”

Courtney: Oh, no! [laughs] But this, “You’ll be miserable no matter what you do,” sentiment apparently also translates to having children. For this quote says, “Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.” It’s all very, oh women, can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Who said that? Did a boomer say that? Is that the boomer version of that quote? Although, when I was growing up, the twist on that, that, like, all of the women in my god-family said growing up was, “Men: can’t live with them, can’t shoot them.” So that– that’s the one I heard all the time.

Royce: I’m seeing some sources cite that to the Dutch philosopher, Erasmus.

Courtney: Oh.

Royce: That would be 1500-ish.

Courtney: Much older.

Royce: Is the Renaissance period just the boomer era of history?

Courtney: Is it? I mean… [chuckles] I have been given no evidence to the contrary. Oh, see, I don’t like this quote given modern context. Because now, in the era when we are seeing this pro-natalist movement take a terrifying turn and having an overabundance of power in the current administration, this one takes on a far more sinister tone. “The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.” Oh, maybe I just read it the wrong way even. I just read it under–

Royce: Children growing up to be adults?

Courtney: Yeah, to be productive members of society and to pay taxes and to enter the workforce.

Royce: Rather than parents having to mature?

Courtney: Yeah… But after I took a second glance at it I was like, oh, maybe it’s– maybe it’s the latter. Maybe, if it’s the latter, there’s sometimes some truth to that. I absolutely know some people who were rather naive when they had children, to the point where several people in and around their life were like, “Are you ready for this?” But then, as soon as they had children, totally rose to the occasion. That’s unfortunately not the case for everyone.

Royce: Yeah, you’d think being responsible for another human life would cause you to get your shit together, but not everyone does that.

Courtney: Not everyone does that, no. But yeah, I like– I like the second viewing of that better, but I have been watching these pronatalists for far too long that I could see someone like that saying this exact quote, meaning it to be like we need more people to enter the workforce. We need– [sighs] I don’t like it, I don’t like it. Okay, this one’s kind of funny if you also see it in a very, very modern context. “Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.” Because in a very modern context, I think Boy Moms. Are you familiar with this concept of Boy Moms?

Royce: Vaguely, but let’s hear the explanation. I think I know what you mean.

Courtney: So of course, the internet has memefied this concept, so it can be taken to varying extents. But what I remember to really sort of be the point that sparked this conversation and the branding of boy moms as a group of people – in the same way that Karen’s were branded as a group of people that have certain characteristics – the stereotype is like a mom who, like, if she has a son and a daughter, definitely loves her son more. Like golden child vibes. Or women who always wanted to be a boy mom, so they like overly coddle their boys to the point where, like, their sons can do no wrong. Reject the fact that they could have done anything wrong in school, disrupting in class, if they’re - like - harassing girls. Like that’s not my son, my son is perfect. And like letting them get away with all the shit.

Courtney: Very, very much like the person who would say boys will be boys, and like doing everything for them to the point where they don’t have to learn any basic life skills at all.

Courtney: So they’re the kind of people who raise the kind of men that a lot of people complain about. Like, especially in a like cis hetero context, when there are a lot of, like, young women who start dating guys and are like, “I don’t want to be my boyfriend’s mother,” kind of a thing. So this quote feels very that to me. I don’t know what the intention was behind the original quote being written when it was, because I generally reject the like, oh, too much love is a bad thing. I think there can be toxic types of love. I think there can be parents who are generally toxic.

Courtney: This one’s maybe a little relatable though: “I read about divorce and I can’t see why two people can’t get along together in harmony. And I see two people and I can’t see how either of them can live with each other.” This feels like very specific couple. Like, you do hear generally, like, all these quotes, all this rhetoric, all this conventional wisdom about, “I hate my spouse and it’s normal to hate your spouse.” And you and I look at it and go “What…?” [Royce agrees] Why, how… But then there absolutely been some couples that we know or have seen or have witnessed who have not divorced yet, maybe someday, and we’re like, “How do you live like this? You clearly hate each other. You clearly hate each other!” So, I don’t actually think that’s oxymoronic at all. I think that’s just looking at the same issue from two very different vantage points.

Courtney: Like, the general concept of divorce in society and large scale picture, like, why are so many people so dysfunctional? But then you can look at someone very close up, very individual, and you’re like, uh, but you… Now I kind of see with that situation. I don’t think those two things are at odds with each other at all. Oh, boo, boo Ladies Home Journal! Boo! No. “Of course a platonic relationship is possible, but only between husband and wife.” Boo Ladies Home Journal!

Courtney: Uhm, “After winning an argument with his wife, the wisest thing a man can do is apologize.” That’s also its own brand of a very cishet take on marriage where, like, the woman is always right. Although both sides kind of say that. Like cishet allo women often say it very earnestly. Like it is true, it is a fact, the woman is always right. And then you have this like – wow, reading these quotes, reading this book from 2004, is bringing me back to 2004 vernacular – but like this very whipped dude who’s just like, doesn’t mean it earnestly, but we’ll still say it and we’ll still perform it.

Courtney: “Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings.” “Bride: (noun) a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.” Oh see, I kind of like this one because it’s not about hating your spouse or your family: “The average child is an almost non-existent myth. To be normal, one must be peculiar in some way or another.” I like that one. Are not we all somewhat peculiar? She asks on a podcast with a nearly 100% queer audience. [chuckles] No, I know it’s not completely 100% queer. I know we’ve got some allies out there. Some of you have written to us. You’re great, we love you.

Courtney: “Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.” There’s something about that I appreciate a little bit. A little bit. Because for as much as the pronatalists and people who agree with them say people need to have a lot more kids and people who don’t have kids are selfish. I know so many people who have chosen not to have kids for very considerate reasons, and I know a lot of people who have had children for very selfish reasons. Who the hell said this? “Pregnancy is difficult for women, but it is even more difficult for men.”

Royce: I’m willing to assume it was a man.

Courtney: Susan Cheever. So not a man, but I really want to know the context in which she said that. I tried looking it up real quick and it is from a book that she wrote, and the first review on Goodreads that pops up is a one-star review that specifically cites this quote. The full quote is: “Pregnancy is difficult for women, but it is even more difficult for men. Men are often literal creatures and pregnancy asks them to change the way they act and think on the basis of an abstract principle: the expected birth of a child.” The reviewer says, “Cheever randomly states this even after she started the paragraph by saying: ‘Stranger than the physical discomfort was Linda’s sense of impending doom. She desperately wanted a child, but she knew that a child would change everything in ways she couldn’t imagine. She felt like a passenger in a car headed for a cliff.’ Aside from the fact that she presents no basis for her opinions stated as facts and that she is incredibly negative about the whole thing, don’t her descriptions describe a similar experience between the sexes? Doesn’t Linda feel exactly the same as Cheever is saying a man would feel? She did stuff like this throughout the book and it was really grating to me.”

Courtney: This review also started with: “For this book, Cheever extensively interviewed a woman she thought was representative of the boomer generation and then told her story.” Yeah no, throw that quote out, mm-mm.

Courtney: Ooh, another Chekov. So not only is he giving bad quotes about marriage, but this one’s about kids: “I cannot bear the crying of children, but when my child cries I don’t hear.” Oh see, I kind of like this one too, I only like the ones that aren’t about hating your family. “Playing as children means playing in the most serious thing in the world.” I know playtime is very serious, it’s very serious business, and I think people should take it more seriously.

Royce: Yeah, I gotta line everything up in a row.

Courtney: Get out of here. [laughs] And yes, for the record, lining up all your dinosaur toys in a row is very serious business. The most serious thing in the world. Ew, this one: “Nobody knows how to manage a wife but a bachelor.” That’s a quote about cheating, right? It’s gotta be. This one’s kind of funny. Quote by Lillian Day: “Harold and I didn’t get along badly for married people, but the problem was I didn’t misunderstand him. No, marriage can be completely successful without a reasonable amount of misunderstanding.” I like that in the context of we actually have a good marriage and no one else around us does, so clearly we’re the ones doing something wrong, right?

Courtney: “I have always thought that every woman should marry and no man.” Oh, I want to like that so bad. In a queer context, I want to like that so bad. But unfortunately I know too many gay men who have great husbands that I can’t fully get behind it. But the idea that marriage should only be reserved for, like, lesbians and non-binary people… [laughs] I have to at least entertain the notion of liking this quote. For the probably inadvertent queerness about it. Because that was also Benjamin Disraeli, so we’re talking like Victorian era politician in the UK. So he didn’t mean it that way, but that’s how I choose to receive it. In this, the year 2025.

Courtney: “The only good husbands stay bachelors. They’re too considerate to get married.” That one’s funny for me. Because on its surface it’s a little like the parents are the last people who should be having kids, which in a certain context, I get where one might say that. In this one, I don’t know if I can get where that is. Because it’s still saying, even in a situation where it’s a given that this man would make a great husband, it’s still bad to get married. I just can’t get behind that as a given. Like, there are bad spouses that can create bad marriages, for sure, but you’re saying good husbands don’t get married because they know marriage bad. No, I no uh-uh.

Courtney: Ooh, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.” I tend to agree, but in like an all or nothing sense. Like if you have all the genders or multiple genders, we can talk. If you have no gender at all, also, we can talk. Only one gender? Not– not so sure about that. I’m kidding! Some of my favorite people only have one gender. I have friends who only have one gender, like three of them maybe. Oh, this one’s bleak: “A girl must marry for love and keep on marrying until she finds it.” Which is even more bleak when paired with this quote: “People marry for a variety of reasons and with varying results, but to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.” So many of these people sound so miserable.

Royce: Going back to that Socrates quote earlier, is that why they became writers of some fashion and why they were quoted in the book?

Courtney: I guess.

Royce: Are books like these basically the same phenomenon that we see on internet comment threads, where the people with the most extreme emotions are the only voices that you hear?

Courtney: Oh my gosh, that might be it. Is that why there’s such an over flooding of ‘I hate my spouse, I hate marriage. My family sucks. I hate my kids.’

Royce: Because the happy ones aren’t locking themselves in a room in their house and writing a book?

Courtney: Yeah. There’s not enough angst. Because I suppose the loudest voices in ‘marriage and family are great and the best actually’ have this like toxic positivity spin on it that’s normally, at least slightly, religiously tinted, if not overtly, oversaturatedly religious. And also tends to have this extreme gender binary about it that is just an extreme red flag for so many people. Ah, here’s– Here’s another one about children: “We, all of us, wanted babies, but did we want children?” So many things like that. So many people, whether it’s “I want a baby, but I didn’t want a child,” or “I wanted a child but I didn’t want a teenager.” Or “I wanted a child but not a disabled one.” Or “I wanted a child but not a queer one.” So many people have kids with this very narrow view of who they suspect or demand that kid to be, and then are terribly disappointed when expectation does not meet reality.

Courtney: Ugh, I don’t even know where to go with this one. I just hate it so much. “Adultery is a meanness and a stealing. A taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness. And surrounded and guarded by lies lest it be found out. And out of the meanness and selfishness and lying flow love and joy and peace beyond anything that can be imagined.” Yeah, I don’t even know if I want to start with that one. I’m just gonna leave it where it is. I trust our listeners to know all the issues that are in there. Yikes!

Courtney: Ooh, here’s one from the first century AD: “The wife should be inferior to the husband. That is the only way to ensure equality between the two.” Cool. Oh, this one also, same time period. Maybe this is the ‘can’t live with them, can’t live without them’, the beginning of it. “You’re obstinate, pliant, merry, morose, all at once. For me, there’s no living with you or without you.” I think we of it!

Royce: Who is that?

Courtney: Martial, a Roman poet from the late first century. I don’t like this one. I don’t like this mindset in general, not even pertaining to marriage, but: “When a man brings his wife flowers for no reason, there’s a reason.” There’s– [sighs] That’s such a cynical way to look at things and I hate it so much. And it reminds me– And here’s why I hate it so much. When I was a kid, like, maybe eight or nine, I was just like reading a book. I can’t even tell you what it was because it wasn’t notable except for the fact that, like, a kid decided to, like, rub their grandmother’s feet or something because her feet were sore. And I remember reading that and going like, “Wow, I genuinely can’t picture like just offering to rub someone’s feet.” That seemed so weird and unnatural to me because I was like, “I don’t really want to rub someone’s feet.” But the way I was reading it, it was like she loved it, she was so happy, she was grateful for it. So I was like, oh, this is like a selfless thing I can do. And so I, like, called my grandma into the living room and I was like, “Here, have a seat, put your feet up.”

Courtney: I, like, pulled up this footstool and told her to put her feet up. And then I sat down and I started rubbing her feet, thinking she was going to love it, and this was a thing I was kind of uncomfortable doing, but I was doing it because - you know - it’s a nice thing to do. And she just, like, rolled her eyes and said, “Okay, what do you want?” And I just started sobbing. [laughs] I was so upset. I was like, I stepped out of my own comfort zone because I thought this would be a nice thing to do for you, and I love you, and you do a lot of things for me, so I’m going to try to do something for you. But then I tried doing the same thing for my mom, because I was like, “That didn’t work, let’s try it again.” And my mom did the same thing! She didn’t ask with as much contempt as my grandmother did. She was lighter, she had a lighter heart about it. But she’s like, “Okay, what do you want?” And I was like, why? Why do you keep asking me this?

Courtney: Cause, neither of those two had ever asked me that before, nor had I ever done something nice to them because I wanted something. So there was no pre-established pattern of this at all. So I was like, why?! Why am I trying to do a nice thing and no one just accepts it as a nice thing? That was a very harsh lesson for an eight-year-old, who was well-meaning, to learn. And you know what? I never rubbed anyone’s feet ever again. That’s where I draw the line. No foot rubs for anyone, because you don’t deserve it. You will not appreciate it. Although you rub my feet, though, and I appreciate it. Although [chuckles] every time you squeeze my feet, they, like, my feet bones pop. And now I really want to test it. Because yesterday you were like, “At least once every 24 hours, your feet pops.” And you’re like, “Well, no, it’s probably less than that, probably every 12 hours.”

Royce: Yeah, I said that because it happened early in the morning and late at night that same day, so the reset timer must be a little faster.

Courtney: Maybe it’s less than 12 hours. We have to do a science about this. How often do my feet bones crack?

Royce: I mean, it probably depends on the day and what you’re doing.

Courtney: See, I don’t like quotes that are like, I hate children, actually. “I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.” No… No! Ooh, we’ve got some Nietzsche in here: “If married couples did not live together, happy marriages would be more frequent.”

Royce: I don’t know if I’d classify that one as oxymoronica.

Courtney: I wouldn’t either.

Royce: It’s like there are actually modern day relationships that are learning, “Yeah, we don’t have to follow this strict organization of a marriage.” Whether that’s separate bedrooms or separate houses or apartment living spaces.

Courtney: Yeah, I mean, I think that is true for a certain type of person. I think some people are better equipped to cohabitate with other people than others. I’ve certainly known some people in my life who should not ever live with anyone, no matter what the relationship is – marriage, children, platonic roommate situations – they just cannot cope with sharing a space with someone else. And you know what? They shouldn’t have to. But I don’t think living together is inherently going to cause friction. Conventional wisdom says that it will. But I think the right relationship and the right personality types and the right, like, lifestyle habits.

Royce: Yeah, living with others causes tension when people don’t know how to communicate around space issues.

Courtney: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I think the only reason why, again, I’m– I’m disagreeing with the author’s viewpoint on some of these, because the only way I think I can consider that to be oxymoronic is if you consider marriage to inherently mean cohabitating, and I just disagree. This one’s kind of interesting. I’m curious your take on this: “A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.”

Royce: I’m not quite sure how to interpret that. I think it can go a couple of different ways. I think it makes sense, which again I think, puts it at odds with a lot of the things in the book here. [Courtney chuckles] Because if I think about guarding your solitude, I’m thinking about a situation where you have said, “I need some time to focus on something uninterrupted,” and so I’m planning part of my day around that to make sure that things are taken care of, like before or after. And handling things if you are in the middle of, like, focus time, work time, so that you don’t need to deal with them.

Courtney: That’s certainly one take on it that I agree with.

Royce: How do you interpret it?

Courtney: I mean that’s a component of it, but I think it can be even more so than that. Like, we’ve kind of talked before in terms of, like, social battery or social anxiety. Like, you have often said, like, “My social anxiety does not perceive you as a person.” Like, when we are together it is similar to being alone in a social battery context. Like we no longer drain each other’s social batteries. I don’t think we ever did. But whereas, if one of us alone was hanging out with a group of external people or if the two of us were hanging out with a group of external people, there’s only so much battery that’s there. And oftentimes yours is less than mine when it comes to social situations. So, being able to identify that and either make sure we aren’t overextending that because I’m now paying consideration to what your social battery is as opposed to mine, or knowing when - you know - if I’m leaving the house or if I’m going to hang out with someone, like is this something you actually want to do and come along, or should I just go alone this time?

Courtney: So there’s that aspect of it. There’s also– You have absolutely, like, at various points, like, fielded emails for me, because emails stress me out entirely. And nothing drains my battery more than asynchronous communication, as opposed to actually physically being in person with someone or having a real time conversation. But that doesn’t bother you quite as much. So there have been times where you have, like, helped me with emails to varying extents. But you don’t like phone calls. That’s something that gives you a lot of anxiety. So I handle, like, all the phone calls in the house if we need to make appointments, call utilities companies for various reasons. Like, we just in general plan our lives in a way that we are a unit with different strengths and different energies, and so it’s sort of that, like, division of labor also, I think, has a component to that.

Courtney: Oh, Mickey Rooney: “There’s no one more depressed than a happily married man.” Ow, “A good father is a little bit of a mother.” If you’re looking at that from a lens of how things are, and have been historically in the gender binary, I kind of have to agree with it. But if you’re looking at it in the way we want things to be or we conceptualize things to be, in which that gender binary is not so toxic, then it doesn’t sound great. Ah, John Steinbeck: “The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant.” That’s that same mindset of, “Oh, women actually want a man. They say they don’t want a man, but then they hate us for not being manly.” And that often comes with the, like, “I know what women want more than they do.” Oh, Gloria Steinem: “Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” What was her original quote? This was negative about marriage in general. “The surest way to be alone is to get married.” So, uh, she had a bad marriage. “Never have children, only grandchildren.” I mean… [laughs] I kind of get it. [laughs] I want a grandchild. But see, the problem is if I have a child, I don’t want to be the kind of parent who has a child, hoping that they will have children. So that feels like not a guaranteed way to become a grandparent either, which this is in here as oxymoronica, because clearly you have to have children in order to have grandchildren, but that doesn’t even always work out.

Royce: There are loopholes. [Courtney laughs] If you’re just the nice older person who is in an area, you’ll get adoptive children and grandchildren.

Courtney: I can’t wait for that, to be honest. Ah, William Wordsworth, not only do you have a great last name for being quoted, but I like this so much because of the game we’re replaying now. Let’s see if you can catch it. “The child is father of the man.”

Royce: Oh yeah, we saw a similar quote a couple of hours ago. We are replaying Deltarune, chapters one and two, now that three and four are out.

Courtney: Yeah. And there’s just one, “I’m the dad now!” I like it. I like it so much.

Royce: Followed soon after by something like prisons are for dads only.

Courtney: Yep. And that is the last quote of this chapter. So we have been through all the quotes about love, family, sex, marriage.

Royce: The final quotes were, “I’m the dad now,” and, “Prisons are for dads only.”

Courtney: “I’m the dad now!” Says the son. Yes. The final quote is actually Toby Fox. Which that too– I know some listeners have written into us asking us to talk about Undertale, and admittedly, Undertale is one of my favorite games of all time, so maybe, maybe, it’s under consideration. I don’t know how Deltarune is going to go or how it’s going to end, but even without, like, canon ace representation, there are so many just asexual vibes just sprinkled over that entire game. Especially the first chapter. We’ll see, maybe. Maybe. But for today that is going to bring us to our featured MarketplACE vendor.

Courtney: Today we’re giving a big shout out to Teloka Berry, a variety stickers and stationery made by an aroace autistic woman who loves women. And some of the stickers I purchased from her I just absolutely love. They are great. It doesn’t look like they are currently for sale, so I don’t know if those are going to come back, but I have some great, like, holographic, like, asexual colored planets that say Queer On It. Very, very pretty. Love the art style. I think– I think this is also the one where I ordered, like, some kind of fan art of the Untitled Goose Game. I’m pretty sure I have a goose holding a knife somewhere and I think it is from them.

Courtney: But right now, even though those are not currently for sale, we do have some Sunnydew Duck’s Mail Club where you can get duck stickers, it looks like every single month. And, as I said, this art style is very good. These ducks are incredibly adorable. Very much cutie pies. So I am going to drop that link, as always, in the description box on YouTube and in the show notes on our website. So that’s going to do it for this episode and for this book. I think this book has justifiably become a business expense now, but it was kind of silly to go through and I hope you all enjoyed it.. But it was kind of silly to go through and I hope you all enjoyed it. So with that, we will see you all next time. Bye-bye.