Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.

The saying frames marriage as a reciprocal practice of welcome and reluctance: home should be a place the husband is eager to return to, and the husband’s presence should be so supportive and affectionate that his departure is genuinely felt. Its symmetry stresses mutual responsibility rather than one-sided domestic duty. Read more broadly, it treats everyday emotional climate—warmth, attentiveness, and consideration—as the measure of a good household. The line also reflects a pastoral, practical ethic: love is shown less in grand declarations than in the ordinary rhythms of leaving and returning, where spouses can continually reaffirm each other’s value.