My anti-marriage streak continues:

Dr. Burton was neither the first nor the last to comment that marriage is a hindrance to "all good enterprises." "Woman inspires us to great things," remarked Alexandre Dumas, "and prevents us from achieving them." The bitter Friedrich Nietzsche believed marriage (if not women, in general) a distraction from philosophical pursuits. It is a commonplace that most important writers, artists and philosophers have been bachelors, or in the least effectively single in the way Abelard, Franklin, Rousseau, Milton, Thomas Paine and Shakespeare remained. "Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men," wrote Sir Francis Bacon (not a bachelor, but perhaps wishing he were). H.L. Mencken, who once suggested bringing back the dollar-a-day bachelor tax (it was worth that much to be single) likewise commented on the superiority of the bachelor--only to Mencken it was the bachelor's great intellect and creativity that kept him single, not the other way round. "The bachelor's very capacity to avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom from the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex, in other words, of his greater approximation to the clearheadedness of the enemy sex. He is able to defeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the business an equipment almost comparable to their own."

But what about the bachelor himself?

One enduring myth holds that the bachelor is an expert on the female sex, a legend encouraged by Mencken when he said that "Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too." To my knowledge there has never been a study that sought to determine why men remain bachelors, though the most reluctant among them seem to possess one common trait: a deep and abiding cynicism toward the fairer sex. Not that the bachelor is completely immune to female charms and wiles; he simply has a greater resistance than the average guy, combined perhaps with a more profound dread of connubial bliss. It is a cynicism borne of endless reports of ruined marriages and bitter dissolutions. Of the 50 percent of couples that successfully weather the storms of holy matrimony, a mere 38 percent allow that their marriages are happy ones. Yet for all this doom and gloom the happily unmarried man is not opposed to love. Far from it. More likely he idealizes love more than his married counterpart. "Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing," notes Goethe. "A confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished." Today's relationship gurus warn that marriage must be treated not unlike a job. "When you bring the work strategies that you use in the workplace at home, you can be really successful," says one marriage expert, which brings to mind the words of Robert Burton--that marriage is the last and best cure of romantic love.

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It is easy to adopt an iconic view of the bachelor--a resigned cynic or hopeless romantic, a man of infinite sorrow and sophistication or the misanthropic barroom brawler of story and song--but when it comes to bachelors no single image prevails. "Some will find [bachelorhood] enviable, others pathetic, and both may be right; for it would seem that a bachelor's way of being in the world is both rich and arid, exciting and static," concludes Lopate. And what could be more bittersweet than the memories of unrequited love nursed by an old bachelor? Washington Irving was one well acquainted with this sentiment: "With married men their amorous romance is apt to decline after marriage ... but with a bachelor, though it may slumber, it never dies. It is always liable to break out again in transient flashes, and never so much as on a spring morning in the country; or on a winter evening, when seated in his solitary chamber, stirring up the fire and talking of matrimony."