Daily Inspiration Quote by Finley Peter Dunne

A good husband, Dunne implies, is almost a contradiction in terms, because the institution of marriage is engineered to punish the very qualities we claim to prize. The line works like a neat little logic trap: if you are truly considerate, you opt out. If you opt in, you either weren’t considerate enough to see what you were signing up for, or you’ll be trained out of it.

Dunne was a journalist and satirist writing in an America where marriage was less a romantic lifestyle choice than a civic arrangement with heavy gendered expectations. His joke leans on that asymmetry. The “husband” is framed as someone whose goodness would require sensitivity to the daily, grinding inequities built into the role: who holds power, who does domestic labor, who gets to remain a full person after the wedding. By calling bachelors the only good husbands, he’s not praising perpetual adolescence; he’s indicting the bargain itself.

The wit is surgical because it flips moral credit. Society tends to treat marriage as evidence of maturity and virtue. Dunne suggests the opposite: that the truly ethical man might refuse the social script, precisely because he can imagine the cost to someone else. That’s the subtextual sting: “considerate” becomes a quiet accusation, not a compliment. The line survives because it’s still legible today, when we keep asking whether marriage is a partnership or a performance of tradition, and who quietly pays for everyone else’s stability.