# Home Manners Are Bad Manners explained — Getting Married

> Chapter companion for Getting Married by George Bernard Shaw.

## What happens

This chapter examines how the indissolubility of marriage allows spouses to abandon basic civility and kindness at home, treating their partners and children with a level of rudeness they would never display in public. It argues that the institution of marriage, by trapping people together, fosters domestic tyranny and the decay of humane communication.

## Themes in this chapter

### Critique of Marriage as an Institution

The chapter directly criticizes how indissoluble marriage licenses domestic incivility and abuse, contrasting it with the civility required in general society.

### Hypocrisy and Social Pretense

Highlights the hypocrisy of individuals who maintain polite manners in public but treat their families with cruelty and neglect, using marriage as a dispensation from common decency.

## Key lines

> These terrors conceive marriage as a dispensation from all the common civilities and delicacies which they have to observe among strangers, or, as they put it, 'before company.'

Such people view marriage as a license to abandon the politeness and consideration they show to strangers, behaving at home in ways they would never dare in public.

_Summarizes the chapter's central argument that marriage can become a cover for domestic rudeness and tyranny._

> If such people took their domestic manners into general society, they would very soon find themselves without a friend or even an acquaintance in the world.

If these individuals behaved in public as they do at home, they would quickly become socially isolated.

_Emphasizes the stark contrast between public and private behavior enabled by the indissolubility of marriage._

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/getting_married_se/chapters/home-manners-are-bad-manners
- Book: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/getting_married_se
- All chapters: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/getting_married_se/chapters