Strange to say what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition.

Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), a naval administrator and keen observer of Restoration London, recorded this wry remark in his private diary while reflecting on marriage and the social rituals surrounding it. Pepys was himself married (to Elisabeth de St Michel) and often candid—sometimes rueful—about the constraints, jealousies, and domestic negotiations that accompanied married life. The line comes from one of his diary entries in which he notes, with sardonic amusement, how married people can take a kind of pleasure in watching unmarried friends or acquaintances be lured into matrimony, as if recruiting others into the same burdensome state. The sentiment fits Pepys’s broader habit of mixing self-critique with sharp social comedy.

Pepys treats marriage less as a romantic culmination than as a condition—almost a trap—into which the unmarried are “decoyed.” The humor depends on a double awareness: married people know the costs of the institution (loss of freedom, obligations, conflict), yet they still enjoy seeing others join it. The remark exposes a social psychology of shared predicament: misery (or constraint) seeks company, and participation in a universal institution can feel like vindication of one’s own choice. At the same time, Pepys’s phrasing is self-incriminating; he includes himself among those who take “delight,” suggesting a skeptical, worldly view of marriage as both socially enforced and privately ambivalent.