People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the irony of how people often take more time and care in selecting casual items than in choosing life partners.
Erma Bombeck's quote points out a common paradox in human behavior, suggesting that individuals often invest more thought and effort into choosing superficial items, like bathing suits, compared to the significant choice of a spouse. By encouraging a thoughtful selection process for whom we partner with, the quote emphasizes the importance of comfort, adaptability, and long-term satisfaction in relationships, mirroring how we might approach wardrobe choices.
In practice
During a wedding speech, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of careful consideration in choosing a life partner.
We've got a generation now who were born with semiequality. They don't know how it was before, so they think, this isn't too bad. We're working. We have our attache' cases and our three piece suits. I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle.
You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.
Making coffee has become the great compromise of the decade. It's the only thing "real" men do that doesn't seem to threaten their masculinity. To women, it's on the same domestic entry level as putting the spring back into the toilet-tissue holder or taking a chicken out of the freezer to thaw.
Not everyone is comfortable with the kissing ritual. My husband is one of them. Her refuses to press lips with anyone except his wife, mother, and dog. If someone wanted to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he would refuse until he had been formally introduced.
There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.
Maybe age is kinder to us than we think. With my bad eyes, I can't see how bad I look, and with my rotten memory, I have a good excuse for getting out of a lot of stuff.
There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.
I cried a river of tears but he was too heavy to float on them. So I dragged him with me these years across an ocean.
Help one another is part of the religion of our sisterhood.
The great secret of a successful marriage is to treat all disasters as incidents and none of the incidents as disasters.
When you drop a glass or a plate to the ground, it makes a crashing sound. When a window shatters, a table breaks, or a picture fall of the wall, it makes noise. But as for your heart, when that breaks, it's completely silent... and you almost wish there was a noise to distract you from the pain.
Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.
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