ahavafriend

"...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.” Who can argue that a brief catalog of famous bachelors reads like a roll call of the architects of Western Civilization?:

Pierre Bayle
Robert Boyle
Johannes Brahms
Samuel Butler
Robert Burton
Ludwig van Beethoven
Johannes Brahms
Giacomo Casanova
Frederic Chopin
Nicolaus Copernicus
Eugène Delacrois
Rene Descartes
Gustave Flaubert
Galileo Galilei
Edward Gibbon
Vincent van Gogh
Oliver Goldsmith
Thomas Hobbes
Horace
David Hume
Washington Irving
Henry James
Franz Kafka
Immanuel Kant
Soren Kierkegaard
Charles Lamb
T. E. Lawrence
Meriwether Lewis
Philip Larkin
Gottfried Leibniz
John Locke
Friedrich Nietzsche
Sir Isaac Newton
Blaise Pascal
Alexander Pope
Marcel Proust
Maurice Ravel
George Santayana
Jean Paul Sartre
Franz Schubert
Benedict de Spinoza
Arthur Schopenhauer
Herbert Spencer
Adam Smith
Stendhal
Jonathon Swift
Nikola Tesla
Henry David Thoreau
Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec
Leonardo da Vinci
Voltaire
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Similarly the contributions of the many (ostensibly) celibate medieval monks and theologians (Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Desiderius Erasmus, Michael Servetus) were essential in dragging Europe out of the dark Age of Faith and paving the way for the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
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Vance Packard, in his 1962 book The Pyramid Climbers, noted that, “In general the bachelor is viewed with circumspection, especially if he is not well known to the people appraising him…[However] the worst status of all is that of a bachelor beyond the age of 36. The investigators wonder why he isn’t married. Is it because he isn’t virile? Is he old-maidish? Can’t he get along with people?” By contrast, the married man was the steady one, the stable lot, not least because, in Tallyrand’s memorable phrase, "a married man with a family will do anything for money.”
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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.

And why shouldn’t the bachelor be as cynical as a roomful of reporters? His male friends are forever praising his great fortune. "Is it generally known that bachelors privately receive encouragement and approbation from married men?" asks Ade. Much, however, remains unsaid. The bachelor's married friends seldom speak of their troubles, though their eyes betray a deep-rooted sorrow and a tragic lonesomeness, not least due to an unfilled desire for male companionship. “If you are afraid of loneliness,” warned Chekhov, “don't marry."
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It was once held that the female—in her dual tasks as mother and wife—played a vital role in tempering the testosterone-fueled excesses of the young male. “Women have always been the carriers of morality and the shapers of the next generation, which seems to me to be far more important than working 60 hours a week in a law firm,” says Robert Bork. Sinclair Lewis, in 1922, drew this memorable portrait of the civilizing influence of women in his novel Babbitt: "Mother corrected Father's vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin." Sir Francis Bacon maintained that, “wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity; and single men…are more cruel and hardhearted (good to make severe inquisitors), because their tenderness is not so oft called upon.” And George Gilder likewise notes that "Men need durable ties to women to discipline them for civilized life, or they become a menace to society and themselves… and tend to live short and destructive lives." Well, that depends on the women, I should think. I doubt the ambiguous state of civilization attained by the average coed featured in a typical Girls Gone Wild video has much influence on today's young man, save to make him hot and bothered. Indeed it would not be difficult to make the case that contemporary women are more in need of the good old civilizing influence than are men.
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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....”

"Looking at the appearance of contemporary young men, one may notice how much their notions of masculinity have changed, how this masculinity is sometimes being replaced by femininity." But, she added to the 400 women and the 10 or so men at the conference: "One cannot help but notice that the world of men has become increasingly effeminate... I don't know if we can see this as our gender's victory."