Why They Married — Inside the Classic

Recurring Images of Traps and Exchanges

Flagg repeatedly frames marriage as a transaction or a trap. In “She Kept Her Word,” a woman marries the first man who offers her a seat on the subway—a literal exchange of courtesy for commitment. “Not a Quitter” turns on a bride who marries the hack driver after the groom fails to appear, because she refuses to return the wedding presents. The imagery of money appears in “Explained at Last,” where a man worth eighty million marries a woman with eighty-two million: “Spondulicks and cash always do!” These poems treat marriage less as romance than as a bargain, often absurdly literal.

Movement from Expectation to Reversal

Nearly every poem follows a two-beat structure: an expectation is stated, then undercut. “Ever Know It to Fail?” has Miss Sue declaring she could never marry a man like Sid—and of course she does. “She Looked So Docile!” describes a husband who insisted on being master, only to live under his wife’s thumb. The reversal is often compressed into the final line, as in “How Was She to Know?” where sweet Alice marries a man who already has a wife in Flushing. This pattern gives the collection a rhythmic predictability that Flagg exploits for comic effect.

Voice and the Authorial Aside

Flagg inserts a knowing authorial voice through the dedication poem, which warns readers not to marry “in an off-hand way” and promises to reveal “these little facts.” The verses themselves adopt a clipped, epigrammatic tone, often ending with a punch line that feels like a shrug. In “A Tonic,” the glum Luella Gloaming marries a recluse because his face makes her laugh. The author does not moralize; he simply presents the reason and moves on. This detached, observational voice—neither celebratory nor condemnatory—shapes the book’s tone of wry acceptance.

Structure as a Series of Punch Lines

The book’s organization is additive rather than narrative. Each poem is self-contained, and the order does not build a story. Instead, the collection works like a vaudeville routine: one sketch after another, each ending with a punch line. The repetition of the “why they married” formula creates a catalog effect. The final poem, “True Companions,” offers a rare positive match, but even that is undercut by the detail that she is “a bully good talker”—the line breaks off mid-sentence in the excerpt, leaving the reader to imagine the rest. The structure invites browsing, not sequential reading.

Readers approaching Why They Married will find a quick, illustrated entertainment best taken in small doses. The poems reward attention to their compressed logic and the gap between expectation and outcome. Flagg’s drawings—not reproduced in this text—were integral to the original book’s humor. The verses alone preserve the structure of the joke, but the full effect depends on the interplay of word and image.

I found myself smiling at how Flagg catches the quiet absurdity in why couples pair up, then wandering back to that Lincoln Imp story, which hums with the same sly truth—that we rarely marry the reasons we tell ourselves. Both left me thinking about fortune’s little jokes. The Legend of the Lincoln Imp — Themes and Context felt like a gentle echo of that same wink.