Marriage is often described as a partnership built on love, trust and companionship. But American writer and satirist Ambrose Bierce had a much darker — and much funnier — way of looking at it.
In The Devil’s Dictionary , Bierce defined marriage as “the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.” The line is vintage Bierce: short, cynical and constructed like a perfectly ordinary dictionary definition before delivering an unexpectedly sharp punchline.
