This phrase states that love and marriage are a natural pair, each one meant to go with the other, in the same way a horse and carriage work only when joined together. It is used to argue, often with a wink, that one does not really make sense without the other: that falling in love is supposed to lead to marriage, and that marriage without love is somehow the wrong way round. Modern uses of the line are frequently playful or mocking rather than solemn, poking fun at the neat, traditional idea it describes.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage’?
The phrase comes directly from a song. It is the opening line of “Love and Marriage”, written in 1955 with lyrics by Sammy Cahn and music by Jimmy Van Heusen. The song was introduced by Frank Sinatra in a 1955 television production of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, broadcast on the anthology series Producers’ Showcase.
Sinatra’s recording of the song went on to become a hit in its own right, and that is what carried the line out of the television broadcast and into everyday speech.
The phrase is not an old proverb that the song happened to use. It was coined for the song itself, pairing love and marriage with a horse and carriage for the rhyme and the comfortable, old-fashioned image that comparison creates. The music historian Thomas Hischak has described it as “probably the biggest Tin Pan Alley hit to come out of a television special”, which gives some sense of how far the song, and with it the line, spread through mid-twentieth-century popular culture. Its durability since then owes less to any lasting truth in the sentiment, which plenty of people would now dispute, and more to the simple, singable rhyme of “marriage” and “carriage”, a couplet so neat that it has stuck in the language as a stock description of the traditional view that the two things are supposed to come as a set.