A Word To Husbands - Analysis

A comic rule that hides a serious survival strategy

Ogden Nash’s little poem is a marriage manual delivered as a joke, and the joke is sharp because it tells a truth many people resist: staying lovingly connected often matters more than winning. The opening metaphor, keeping marriage brimming with love in the loving cup, sets a cozy, almost ceremonial mood—as if love is something you pour, refill, and protect from spilling out. Against that tender image, Nash drops blunt imperatives that sound like streetwise advice rather than romance: Whenever you’re wrong, admit it; Whenever you’re right, shut up.

The “loving cup” versus the urge to be correct

The poem’s core tension is between emotional abundance and argumentative accuracy. Admitting you’re wrong is obvious, even virtuous; the twist is the second rule, which implies that being right can be socially dangerous inside intimacy. Shut up is intentionally inelegant—its rudeness signals how forcefully the speaker wants to interrupt a familiar impulse: to press your advantage, to savor correctness, to make your partner feel it. In Nash’s logic, that impulse is what makes the cup stop brimming.

The turn: love as restraint, not performance

The poem pivots on the contrast between admit it and shut up. One action is reparative speech; the other is deliberate silence. That pairing suggests Nash’s hard-eyed claim: marriage is maintained not just by declarations of love, but by the disciplined refusal to turn everyday life into a courtroom where someone must be proved wrong.