Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded. Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt.

Ferber’s speaker rejects the ideal of a perfectly managed, risk-free marriage, arguing that excessive order and protection can drain life of vitality. The rhetorical questions insist that intimacy, like existence itself, gains meaning from contrast: the “sordid” alongside the “magnificent,” “mud and stars,” and the full spectrum of emotion from love to hate. The piling up of paired opposites suggests that nourishment comes from lived complexity rather than curated harmony. In this view, pain, imperfection, and unpredictability are not merely tolerable costs but essential ingredients of depth, growth, and genuine connection.