Food, love, career, and mothers, the four major guilt groups.

Cathy Guisewite is the creator of the long-running comic strip *Cathy* (syndicated from 1976 to 2010), which satirizes the everyday anxieties of a modern single woman navigating dieting, romance, work, and family expectations. The line about “Food, love, career, and mothers” reflects the strip’s recurring comedic engine: the protagonist’s sense that she is perpetually falling short of competing cultural ideals—thinness and self-control, romantic success, professional achievement, and dutiful daughterhood. The quote is often circulated as a standalone aphorism, but it is characteristic of the strip’s punchline style, distilling a whole set of social pressures into a neat list.

The quote frames guilt as a defining emotional currency in Cathy’s world, grouping it into four domains where social norms and personal desire collide. “Food” evokes body image and self-discipline; “love” the pressure to couple and be emotionally “successful”; “career” the demand to excel professionally while remaining likable; and “mothers” the uniquely charged arena of family obligation and judgment. By calling them “major guilt groups,” Guisewite turns private shame into a taxonomy, using humor to expose how pervasive and patterned these anxieties are—especially for women balancing contradictory expectations. The joke’s bite lies in its recognition: guilt is not incidental but structurally produced by the roles one is expected to perform.