Saw a wedding in the church… and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition.

This remark comes from Pepys’s private diary, written during the early years of his marriage to Elisabeth de St Michel. Pepys records attending a wedding service at church and, in his characteristically candid, comic tone, reflects on the pleasure that already-married onlookers take in watching new couples enter matrimony. The line belongs to the diary’s running thread of ambivalence about married life—affection and domestic pride mixed with irritation, temptation, and a sense of constraint. As a diarist, Pepys often uses everyday London scenes (churchgoing, ceremonies, street life) as prompts for sharp, self-incriminating observations about social habits and human vanity.

Pepys’s quip is a characteristically dry, self-incriminating joke about marriage as a trap: the bride and groom are “poor fools” being “decoyed” into a state that the already-married know to be burdensome, complicated, and irreversible. The sting is doubled by the admission that married spectators feel “delight” at the spectacle—suggesting a mixture of schadenfreude and solidarity, as if marriage recruits new members into a shared predicament. The passage also exemplifies Pepys’s diaristic honesty: he records not the socially approved sentiment (romantic joy) but the private, cynical thought that the ritual can look like a cheerful form of entrapment.