Wealth & Money Quote by Al Goldstein

Cold-blooded pragmatism dressed up as family values: that’s the move here. Goldstein, a porn publisher who made his living puncturing polite fictions, frames infidelity not as a moral failing but as an efficiency hack. The sentence is engineered to scandalize, then to rationalize. It opens with a false dilemma - either “work on the marriage” or the wife is “a moron” - a deliberately crude binary that clears the runway for the punchline: cheating as the sensible middle path.

The subtext is less about marriage than about power and inconvenience. “Disruptive” does the heavy lifting, shifting the argument from ethics to logistics, as if betrayal were merely a maintenance issue. By pairing “family life” with “your bank account,” Goldstein exposes (and exploits) a transactional model of domestic stability: the household is a system to be kept running, not a relationship to be honored. It’s also telling that the cost-benefit calculus centers the cheater’s comfort; the spouse is reduced to an obstacle or a diagnosis.

Context matters. Goldstein came up in an era when male infidelity could be tacitly tolerated and divorce carried heavier social penalties, especially for women. His provocation leans on that asymmetry, turning it into a kind of cynical common sense. The “most sense” phrasing is the final twist of the knife: he’s not confessing guilt, he’s claiming rational superiority, betting that modern readers will flinch - and then recognize how often institutions reward the appearance of stability over the reality of integrity.