Bachelorhood: Boon or Bane?

I thought this article in the New English Review was highly entertaining. It's full of great quotes and enduring myths about bachelors vs. married men. I'm going to reserve judgment on the main question for the time being, but I found this passage interesting:

Not that the bachelor is completely immune to female charms and wiles; he simply has a greater resistance than the average guy, combined perhaps with a more profound dread of connubial bliss. It is a cynicism borne of endless reports of ruined marriages and bitter dissolutions. 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.”

Cynicism coupled with idealism? Sounds familiar...anyway, check it out.