# Too Much of a Good Thing explained — Getting Married

> Chapter companion for Getting Married by George Bernard Shaw.

## What happens

This chapter critiques the idealization of constant familial love, arguing that excessive affection and preoccupation with domestic sentiment can be harmful, particularly to children, and that healthy life requires balance with business and recreation.

## Themes in this chapter

### Hypocrisy and Social Pretense

The chapter exposes the pretense that constant familial love is ideal, arguing it is unrealistic and harmful.

### Illusions of Romantic Love

Challenges the illusion that love should be the central, continuous focus of family life, comparing it to a nuisance in reality.

## Key lines

> The people who talk and write as if the highest attainable state is that of a family stewing in love continuously from the cradle to the grave, can hardly have given five minutes serious consideration to so outrageous a proposition.

Those who claim that constant familial love is the ultimate goal have not thought seriously about how absurd that idea is.

_Critique of idealized family love._

> A wife entirely preoccupied with her affection for her husband, a mother entirely preoccupied with her affection for her children, may be all very well in a book (for people who like that kind of book); but in actual life she is a nuisance.

A woman who is completely focused on loving her husband or children might seem fine in fiction, but in reality she becomes bothersome.

_Rejection of the domestic ideal as impractical._

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/getting_married_se/chapters/too-much-of-a-good-thing
- Book: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/getting_married_se
- All chapters: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/getting_married_se/chapters