100 really funny relationship insults from real people
History’s wittiest insults about husbands and wives, lovers and exes, romance and marriage, sex and the sexes.
Love bites
We start our collection of relationship insults with a jaundiced look at the very basis of the best relationships: love itself.
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
Matt Groening
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.
Julian Barnes
Adore: v.t. To venerate expectantly.
Ambrose Bierce
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
Robert Frost
Do you know the difference between involvement and commitment? Think of ham and eggs. The chicken is involved. The pig is committed.
Martina Navratilova
Love & marriage, and other mismatches
Not everyone believes that one follows the other, as these next relationship insults show.
Love: n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Ambrose Bierce
Love the quest; marriage the conquest; divorce the inquest.
Helen Rowland
A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve has been extracted.
Helen Rowland
A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he’s finished.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Marriage disparaged
No collection of relationship insults would be complete without a few sharp remarks on the subject of marriage.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen
When you see what some girls marry, you realize how they must hate to work for a living.
Helen Rowland
I married beneath me. All women do.
Nancy Astor
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same thing.
Oscar Wilde – also quoted in Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying as
“Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same thing.”
By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.
Socrates
Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.
Samuel Butler
Drama critics are there to show gay actors what it’s like to have a wife.
Hugh Leonard
It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four.
Samuel Butler
Thick and Thin
Pop Bitch’s name for David and Victoria Beckham
I knew Elizabeth Taylor when she didn’t know where her next husband was coming from.
Anne Baxter
Men who have pierced ears are better prepared for marriage. They’ve experienced pain and bought jewellery.
Rita Rudner
In olden times sacrifices were made at the altar — a custom which is still continued.
Helen Rowland
I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog which growls every morning, a parrot which swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.
Marie Corelli
Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.
William Shakespeare
Bride: n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
Ambrose Bierce
There is so little difference between husbands you might as well keep the first.
Adela Rogers St. Johns
When a man opens the car door for his wife, it’s either a new car or a new wife.
Prince Philip
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
H.L. Mencken
Famous relationship insults from real people
Wry remarks about loved ones and funny quotes about love gone awry.
I wish that dear Karl could have spent more time acquiring capital instead of merely writing about it.
Jenny Marx
Why don’t you write books people can read?
Nora Joyce on the novels of her husband James
If you weren’t such a great man you’d be a terrible bore.
Catherine Gladstone on husband William
I haven’t reported my missing credit card to the police because whoever stole it is spending less than my wife.
Ilie Năstase
I don’t see so much of Alfred anymore since he got so interested in sex.
Clara Kinsey on the author of the Kinsey Reports on sexual behaviour
When my jokes are explained to her, and she has leisure to reflect upon them, she laughs very heartily.
Sydney Smith on his wife Catharine
Here lies my wife; here let her lie!
Now she’s at peace and so am I.
John Dryden
We were happily married for eight months. Unfortunately, we were married for four and a half years.
Nick Faldo
He was so mean it hurt him to go to the bathroom.
Britt Eklund on former lover Rod Stewart
I thought I told you to stay in the car.
Tallulah Bankhead to former lover who greeted her at a party
saying he hadn’t seen her for 41 years
You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you.
Carly Simon on unnamed former lover in the song of the same title
I always knew Frank would wind up in bed with a boy.
Ava Gardner on learning about former lover Frank Sinatra’s marriage to Mia Farrow
Martina was so far in the closet she was in danger of being a garment bag.
Rita Mae Brown on former lover Martina Navratilova
Sexual relationships and other insults to dignity
Here are some relationship insults about love and sex. And the love of sex. As with any such collection, it reveals much about social mores past and present.
The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.
Lord Chesterfield on sex
I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.
Steve Martin
Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.
Billy Crystal
Like being the slave of a crazy man.
Sophocles on the male libido
In America, sex is an obsession. In other parts of the world, it’s a fact.
Marlene Dietrich
The kind of man who will end up dying in his own arms.
Mamie van Doren on Warren Beatty
The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he cannot get on with them.
Rosamund Lehman on Ian Fleming
I fail to see why not; everyone else has.
Noel Coward on seeing a poster for Michael Redgrave
and Dirk Bogarde in the film The Sea Shall Not Have Them
Most in this depraved age think a woman learned enough if she can distinguish her husband’s bed from another’s.
Hannah Woolley
Madame de Genlis, in order to avoid the scandal of coquetry, always yielded easily.
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
If all the girls attending were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
Dorothy Parker on the Yale prom
She’s the original good time that was had by all.
Bette Davis on an unnamed starlet
The “t” is silent. As in “Harlow”.
Margot Asquith in response to
actress Jean Harlow pronouncing her first name with a “t”
Eva Perón, on a hostile crowd in Milan: Do you hear that? They are calling me a whore!
Italian naval officer: I understand perfectly; I have not been to sea in fifteen years, and they still call me admiral.
Unnamed Italian admiral
Men aren’t attracted to me by my mind. They’re attracted by what I don’t mind.
Gypsy Rose Lee
I’m as pure as driven slush.
Tallulah Bankhead
I used to be Snow White but I drifted.
Mae West
I climbed the ladder of success, wrong by wrong.
Mae West
That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say “No” in any of them.
Dorothy Parker on an unnamed linguist
When women go wrong, men go right after them.
Mae West
An equal opportunity lech.
Michael Stipe on himself
When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.
Matt Groening
Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken.
Isabel Allende
We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.
Lily Tomlin
It’s been so long since I made love I can’t even remember who gets tied up.
Joan Rivers
You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.
Dorothy Parker’s answer when asked to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence
The first man to have cut a swathe through the theatre and left it strewn with virgins.
Frank Harris on George Bernard Shaw
This was Doris Day’s first picture. Before she became a virgin.
Oscar Levant
You know that look that women get when they want to have sex? Me neither.
Steve Martin
Insults about relationships with men
Men. You can love them or laugh at them. These next relationship insults are good examples of the latter. How much of the former is involved is up for debate.
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought of half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
Charlotte Whitton
Men are luxuries, not necessities.
Cher
Here’s all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.
George Carlin
The useless piece of flesh at the end of a penis is called a man.
Jo Brand
The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his chest.
Roseanne Barr
Men can read maps better than women. ‘Cos only the male mind could conceive of one inch equalling a hundred miles.
Roseanne Barr
It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.
Dave Barry
When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It’s a whole different way of thinking.
Elayne Boosler
Men have wonderful minds. So much is stored inside — all those sports scores and so on.
Jane Seymour
Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.
Jerry Seinfeld
A man’s heart may have a secret sanctuary where only one woman may enter, but it is full of little anterooms which are seldom vacant.
Helen Rowland
A gentleman is a patient wolf.
Henrietta Tiarks
Most single men don’t even live like people. They live like bears with furniture.
Rita Rudner
God gave us all a penis and a brain, but only enough blood to run one at a time.
Robin Williams on men
Insults about relationships with women
Tempting the fury of womanhood scorned, here are some scathing takes on the female of the species.
Belladonna: n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
Ambrose Bierce
Adamant: n. A mineral frequently found beneath a corset. Soluble in solicitate of gold.
Ambrose Bierce
Men at most differ as Heaven and Earth, but women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry “We will not be dictated to” and promptly became stenographers.
G.K. Chesterton
A woman can say more in a sigh than a man can say in a sermon.
Arnold Haultain
Women can always put things in fewest words. — Except when it’s blowing up; and then they lengthens it out.
Charles Dickens
What has been spoken in secret will be revealed in the women’s quarters.
Ancient Sumerian proverb
Women don’t want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think — in a deeper voice.
Bill Cosby
Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women.
Elsa Schiaparelli
The chief excitement in a woman’s life is spotting women who are fatter than she is.
Helen Rowland
I will never understand women. I will never understand how you can take boiling hot wax, pour it onto your upper thigh, rip the hair out by the root…and still be afraid of a spider.
Jerry Seinfeld
There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL convertible.
P.J. O’Rourke
Women should be obscene and not heard.
Groucho Marx
A woman’s place is in the wrong.
James Thurber
The look of love
Sometimes beauty is in the eye of the belittler, as this batch of relationship insults shows.
Nycilla dyes her locks, ’tis said,
But ’tis a foul aspersion;
She buys them black; they therefore need
No subsequent immersion.
Marcus Valerius Martial
You’d be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap
Dolly Parton
This man has child-bearing lips.
Joan Rivers on Mick Jagger
Boy George is all England needs — another queen who can’t dress.
Joan Rivers
She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork.
Jonathan Swift
Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not colour, but to accept God’s final word on where your lips end.
Jerry Seinfeld
The simple truth is that balding African-American men look cool when they shave their heads, whereas balding white men look like giant thumbs.
Dave Barry
When I go to the beauty parlour, I always use the emergency entrance.
Phyllis Diller
Classic comebacks
You’ve got to love a witty riposte. These classic relationship insults are the last word on having the last word.
Earl Wilson: Have you ever been mistaken for a man on the telephone?
Tallulah Bankhead: No, have you?
Tallulah Bankhead
Bessie Braddock: Winston, you’re drunk.
Winston Churchill: Bessie, you’re ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober.
Winston Churchill
Lady Astor: If you were my husband, I’d poison your coffee!
Winston Churchill: My dear, if you were my wife I’d drink it
Winston Churchill
You could move.
Abigail Van Buren (Dear Abby)
in response to a reader wanting to know how to improve
the quality of the neighbourhood following the arrival of a gay couple