Many a man who falls in love with a dimple make the mistake of marrying the whole girl.

Evan Esar was known for compact, epigrammatic one-liners about courtship and marriage, often framed as wry cautions against romantic self-deception. This quip belongs to that tradition: it imagines a man captivated by a single charming detail (a dimple) and then discovering—too late—that marriage entails commitment to the whole, complex person rather than an idealized feature. The line circulated as a stand-alone aphorism in mid‑20th‑century collections of Esar’s humor and in quotation anthologies, typically without a narrative setup, suggesting it was crafted as a detachable maxim rather than excerpted from a longer argument.

Esar’s quip satirizes the way romantic infatuation can fixate on a single charming detail—here, a “dimple”—and then overgeneralize that attraction into a lifelong commitment. The humor depends on the abrupt shift from a tiny feature to “the whole girl,” implying that the lover has mistaken a part for the person. Beneath the joke is a caution about projection: people may marry an idealized image built from a few appealing traits rather than a clear-eyed understanding of a partner’s full character, habits, and compatibility. It also reflects a broader tradition of aphorisms warning against confusing momentary desire with durable judgment.

Many a man falls in love with a dimple and makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.
Many a man who falls in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole woman.