Take this marriage thing seriously - it has to last all the way to the divorce.

The line is a characteristically sardonic inversion of conventional marital advice. By urging people to take marriage “seriously” only because it must endure “all the way to the divorce,” Barr punctures the ideal of lifelong permanence and replaces it with a more cynical, pragmatic horizon: relationships may be temporary, but the commitments and consequences within them are real. The joke depends on the collision between the solemn rhetoric of marital duty and the modern reality of divorce as a common endpoint. It also functions as social commentary on how institutions can be treated as performative—maintained until they are formally dissolved—while still demanding emotional labor and legal seriousness along the way.