He was a perfect husband: he never picked up anything from the floor, of turned out a light, or closed a door.  In the morning darkness, when he found a button missing from his clothes, she would hear him say: “A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.”  Every day, at his first swallow of coffee and at his first spoonful of soup, he would bread into a heartrending howl that no longer frightened anyone, and then unburden himself: “The day I leave this house, you will know it is because I grew tired of always having a burned mouth.”
 
In the restorative idleness of solitude, on the other hand, the widows discovered that the honorable ways to live was at the body’s bidding, eating only when one was hungry, loving without lies, sleeping without having to feign sleep in order to escape the indecency of official love, possessed at last of the right to an entire bed to themselves, where no one fought them for half of the sheet, half of the air they breathed, half of their night, until their bodies were satisfied with dreaming their own dreams, and they woke alone.

Without true love and in a superficial and pressure filled world, Fermina Daza represents every woman and man that suffers from an imprisoning marriage.  She finds herself in a marriage that has compromised her joy and love for life, while instead she has secured a high social and economic standing. Throughout the book Marquez establishes a theme of love and its presence, or lack there of, in marriage. The marriages throughout the book illustrate the boredom, fake happiness, and a forced loved that marriage can result in.  The sarcastic and mocking tone toward marriage in these passages reinforces the idea of critical evaluation of marriage and true love that is seen throughout the book.