Marriage is give and take. You’d better give it to her or she’ll take it anyway.

Joey Adams (1911–1999) was a nightclub comedian and aphorist whose one-liners about marriage and domestic life circulated widely in mid‑20th‑century American popular culture, especially through stand-up routines, newspaper quote columns, and joke/quotation anthologies. This quip belongs to that tradition of “battle-of-the-sexes” humor, built for quick delivery and audience recognition rather than a specific documented occasion. It reflects a period when mainstream comedy often framed marriage as a negotiation of power and compromise, with the punchline turning the ideal of mutual “give and take” into a wry warning about who ultimately gets their way.

The line begins with a cliché—marriage requires reciprocity—then undercuts it by recasting “give and take” as a contest. The joke’s logic is pragmatic: if you don’t voluntarily concede, your spouse will extract the concession anyway, so you might as well “give” first and preserve harmony (or at least avoid escalation). Its humor depends on exaggeration and a stereotyped assumption of spousal leverage, using the language of compromise to imply inevitability. Read more broadly, it satirizes how ideals of equality can be distorted into strategic bargaining, where peace is maintained less by mutual understanding than by preemptive capitulation.