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

This remark comes from Samuel Pepys’s private diary, written during the Restoration period in London (1660s). Pepys—naval administrator, court-connected civil servant, and keen observer of everyday life—often recorded churchgoing, social visits, and public ceremonies alongside candid reflections on marriage and desire. In noting a wedding he happened to witness in church, he frames it with wry, self-aware cynicism: as a married man (to Elisabeth Pepys), he recognizes the social pleasure spectators take in weddings while simultaneously implying that marriage can feel like a trap once one has entered it. The diary’s confessional tone allows him to voice sentiments unlikely to be expressed publicly.

Pepys’s line is comic but edged with disillusionment. He observes a paradox: married people, who know the constraints and compromises of marriage, still relish watching others enter it—almost as if enjoying the spectacle of new recruits being “decoyed” into the same state. The word “poor fools” suggests both pity and superiority, while “our condition” casts marriage as a fixed, perhaps burdensome social status rather than a romantic ideal. The remark also hints at the social function of weddings as public entertainment and communal validation, even when private experience may be more ambivalent. Pepys’s irony exposes the gap between ceremony and lived reality.