John Derbyshire, like most people involved in this discussion, can cite many cases of women who wound up with husbands who were rotten, awful, abusive, or just plain no good. Not infrequently, such women will go on to marry a second husband who is no better.

(I wonder, are we producing so many more men with defective character these days? So many more women with defective judgment? Or perhaps, are their heads so full of modern romantic myths that they don’t even try to bring judgment to bear on matters of the heart?…instead shrugging their shoulders, and sighing, and repeating the received wisdom: “You can’t choose who you love.”)

I’ve certainly run across such situations myself, too many times. Yet I tend to be even better at collecting wronged-husband stories. Some of the tales involving full-on divorce feature spectacular, arresting twists and turns; but I think what haunts me more are the many men I know who are not exactly abused, not discarded by their wives or even cheated on; yet I see them age in front of me, getting worn down by life faster than anyone should. And the main reason for this—or so concerned family and friends often conclude—is that almost everything about such a man’s life is made more difficult on account of his wife being in it.

Now it is true that even the best marriages place great demands and strains on persons; and a man who shrinks from the challenge inherent in marriage, or whines about it constantly, is not much of a man at all. But in a good marriage, there should be reciprocity and a sense of shared struggle, sacrifice for the sake of the other and for the whole; and in the end some achievement, some comfort, some reward.

The marriages I have in mind are not this way. In them, if there is sacrifice, it is usually unnecessary; if there are demands, they run overwhelmingly one way; if there is struggle, it is often the result of one egocentric party’s neediness and grasping and inability to ever find contentment or leave well enough alone.

Perhaps I can best illustrate by means of a well-known counter-example. Those who have known George W. Bush well over the years seem to all agree that he would never have become Governor, much less President—might never, in fact, have been anything more than a mediocre businessman who liked to drink and skated by on family connections—if it weren’t for Laura.

That story flabbergasts me. I’m pretty sure it’s true; and many of the details correlate with those of friends and family members who also have healthy, positive marriages. Yet still I am flabbergasted. The pain of personal experience, reinforced by the similar experience of other men close to me, looms just too large. I am too used to seeing things the opposite way: “Oh, what more could he have achieved, how much happier could he have been, how serene his life could have been, were it not for her !”

And surely the lament is just the same among those most closely touched by the travails of wronged wives: “…oh, were it not for him !”

How much ruin there is in a bad marriage! Such pain and heartache! Such twisted wreckage it can leave behind, so deep in our souls! Why do we risk it?

And why do we allow our children to risk it? Anyone who thinks I’m going to ever let my daughter or son, once they hit puberty, near any member of the opposite sex anywhere near their ages, has got another thing coming…

Well, okay: I’ll take that back. I am a big softie, after all; and I am still a romantic deep down there somewhere. I will allow my children to date, with my wholehearted blessing.

Just as soon as the youngest turns thirty.