Love & Passion Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

O'Rourke lands the punch by flipping the moral script in a way that feels instantly legible and instantly wrong. The line borrows the solemn cadence of advice-you-might-frame ("Never be unfaithful...") and then detonates it with the exception clause: "except with your wife". It is a classic O'Rourke move: smuggle a cultural critique inside a joke that sounds like a barroom aphorism.

The intent isn't to endorse cheating so much as to expose the strange, historically durable double standard built into romantic ethics. The lover is treated as the relationship you owe loyalty to; the wife becomes the loophole. That's the grimly comic subtext: in certain male-coded narratives, marriage is recast not as the primary bond but as bureaucracy, the official arrangement that can be mocked or circumvented. The joke depends on a world where a "lover" implies glamour, risk, and self-justifying passion, while "wife" implies duty, routine, and social consequence. O'Rourke doesn't need to spell any of that out; the audience supplies it, which is why the line stings.

Context matters: O'Rourke came up as a journalist and satirist in an era when American humor often laundered uncomfortable truths about masculinity through quips. The cynicism is doing two jobs at once: it winks at the old chauvinist mythos of the roving husband, then indicts it by making its logic sound absurdly formal. If you laugh, you're also caught recognizing the culture that makes the punchline possible.