The Anatomy of Melancholy

4 Are you in adversity? She will comfort and assist you, bearing part of your burden to make it more bearable. 5 Are you at home? She will drive away melancholy. 6 Are you abroad? She watches you leave home, longs for you in your absence, and joyfully welcomes your return.

7 Nothing is delightful without companionship; no companionship is so sweet as marriage. 8 The bond of conjugal love is unbreakable. 9 The dear company of relatives increases: the number of parents is doubled, and of brothers, sisters and descendants.

10 You become the father of beautiful, fortunate children. 11 Moses curses barrenness in marriage; how much more a single life? 12 If nature does not escape punishment, surely your will shall not avoid it.

All this is true, you say, and who does not know it? But how easy it is to answer these arguments and construct a counter-parody directly opposed to them! As an exercise, I shall try.

1 Have you means? You have someone to spend them. 2 Have you none? Your poverty is increased. 3 Are you prosperous? Your happiness is ended.

4 Are you in adversity? Like Job’s wife, she will aggravate your misery, torment your soul and make your burden unbearable. 5 Are you at home? She will scold you out of doors. 6 Are you abroad? If you are wise, stay there: perhaps she will give you cuckold’s horns while you are away, and scowl at you when you come home.

7 Nothing gives more contentment than solitude, and no solitude compares with single life. 8 The bond of marriage is unbreakable: there is no hope of loosening it; you are ruined. 9 Your numbers increase: you will be eaten out of house and home by your wife’s relations.

10 An unchaste wife makes you a cuckold, and you will bring up other people’s children instead of your own. 11 Paul commends marriage, yet prefers a single life. 12 Is marriage honourable? What an immortal crown, then, belongs to virginity!

So Sirach himself says all that can be said for and against women; almost every philosopher likewise argues on both sides, and every poet debates the case—though what do “the mass of people” care what they say? Perhaps I can devise such arguments too, and so can you. When all is said, since some are good and some bad, let us take the chance. I therefore conclude with Seneca:

Why do you lie in a lonely bed? Release your sorrowful youth; seize pleasure now, Give the reins free play; keep the best days of life From slipping away.

Why do you lie alone and let your youth and best days pass away? Marry while you can, “while fretful grey age is still absent from your life,” while you are still able and vigorous.

Choose someone to whom you can say, “You alone please me.”

Make your choice freely and at once; do not delay, but take your fortune as it comes. It is true:

Wretched is the man who falls in with A bad wife; happy the one who finds a good one.

There is risk on either side, I confess, whether one lives single or marries.

For both taking a wife and not taking one are an evil.

It may be bad; it may be good. Just as it is an affliction and a calamity on one side, on the other it is a sweet delight, an incomparable happiness, a blessed condition, a benefit beyond expression, a unique contentment. Experience must settle it.