Jean Paul’s novel Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces or the Married Life, Death, and Wedding of the Advocate of the Poor, Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkäs is considered to be the fi rst novel about marriage in German literature. Published as early as twelve years before Johann W. Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) it establishes a new type of novel in which the plot begins from the ending, i.e. from a wedding. The story of a marriage is being told as a process of disbanding. This order will be appropriated in several great 19th century novels written by Goethe, Arnim, Flaubert, Fontane, etc. In my contribution Siebenkäs is as a humorous novel concerning marriage, presented against the background of contemporary discourses on marriage. These discourses are used up by Jean Paul in an artistic way. In his novel he confronts the traditional model of marriage which is represented especially by Joachim Heinrich Campe’s pedagogical writing Väterlicher Rath für meine Tochter (1789) with the new early romantic concepts of love and marriage (as developed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte). The analysis shows that, at fi rst sight, the novel seems to support the romantic love marriage and the equality of men and women. At closer inspection the novel ironically points out the contradictions and the one-sidednesses of this concept. Siebenkäs provides to the romantic concept of marriage a „realistic correlative“ and, in consequence, the love marriage turns out to be just wishful thinking.