the.com/doghouse
The guest room marriage invented before anyone agreed to build one.
means A state of being in serious trouble with someone close to you, usually a spouse, after doing something foolish or thoughtless.
from Literal first: a small outdoor shelter built for a dog. The figurative leap — 'in the doghouse' meaning disgraced or banished from domestic favor — is American slang that took hold in the early 1900s, built on the plain image of being cast out of the house to sleep with the dog. Some point to Peter Pan's Mr. Darling ending up in the dog's kennel as a popular boost to the phrase, though the idiom's roots in ordinary slang likely run independent of any single book.
- origin sense
- figurative disgrace meaning predates the actual structure
- peak usage
- idiom spiked in mid-20th-century sitcom marriages
- real estate irony
- often better insulated than the marriage that built it
- exit strategy
- flowers statistically shorten the sentence