In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, Benjamin Franklin gives his usual witty insight about marriage. Modern historical revisionists often accuse Franklin being a lecherous womanizer with multiple illegitimate children. One source of “evidence” they use, and often quote, is a letter Franklin wrote to a friend on how to choose a mistress. What they fail to quote is the beginning of the letter in which Franklin clearly tells his friend that he is an idiot for wanting a mistress and that he should marry instead. After expounding on the virtues of marriage, he then tells his friend that if he insists on taking a mistress he may consider a few items to reduce his folly. Rather than relying on historical revisionism, one only has to go to the words of the Founders themselves to know who they were and what they truly believed. Here is Franklin’s advice to his friend:
“Marriage is the proper remedy. It is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid happiness. Your reasons against entering into it at present appear to me not well founded. The circumstantial advantages you have in view by postponing it are not only uncertain, but they are small in comparison with that of the thing itself, the being married and settled. It is the man and woman united that make the complete human being. Separate, she wants his force of body and strength of reason; he, her softness, sensibility, and acute discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the world. A single man has not nearly the value he would have in that state of union. He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors. If you get a prudent, healthy wife, your industry in your profession, with her good economy, will be a fortune sufficient ” -Benjamin Franklin
The Citizen Scholar 
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