Commonplace, Robbins

Still don't know what I think of Tom Robbins -- after a decade of putting it off for reasons I can't possibly articulate, I'm finally reading one of his novels -- but I did enjoy this passage:

Heterosexual relationships seem to lead only to marriage, and for most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV, pussy, offspring and creature comforts all under one roof, where he doesn't have to dissipate his psychic energy thinking about them too much -- then he is free to go out and fight the battles of life, which is what existence is all about. But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight, walks off the battlefield and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to 'take care' of her. What a sad bum deal. Women live longer than men because they really haven't been living. Better blue-in-the-face dead of a heart attack at fifty than a healthy seventy-year-old widow who hasn't had a piece of life's action since girlhood

--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues 63 (Bantam 1990 (orig. pub. 1976))

Don't know that I would gender this in quite so binary a fashion, but certainly it seems a worthy observation of two (among many) modes of living.