A man without a wife is like a vase without flowers.

This proverb uses a domestic image to express a social ideal: just as a vase is made to hold and display flowers, a man is portrayed as incomplete or lacking purpose without a wife. The comparison implies that marriage “fills” a man’s life with beauty, meaning, and social legitimacy, reflecting cultures in which adulthood and status are closely tied to forming a household. Read critically, it also encodes gendered assumptions—casting the wife as an ornament or completing element rather than an equal partner—and can be understood as reinforcing patriarchal expectations about marriage and male identity.