Why does a woman work ten years to change a man’s habits and then complain that he’s not the man she married?

The line is a wry observation about romantic idealization and the impulse to “improve” a partner after committing to them. It points to a paradox: sustained efforts to reshape someone’s habits can gradually alter the very qualities that originally attracted the changer, leading to later disappointment framed as betrayal (“not the man she married”). The quote also critiques a common dynamic in heterosexual marriage scripts—women cast as managers of domestic behavior and men as projects—while implying that acceptance and realistic expectations are central to relationship satisfaction. Its humor comes from compressing a long arc of marital conflict into a single rhetorical question.