In an idle moment with America’s Newspaper of record http://www.nypost.com/

this morning, I finally got to reading about the Laci Peterson case. That

poor woman!

Among many other things, her story illustrates one of the dark truths about

humanity: The apparently irresistible tendency of really nice, pretty,

otherwise-sensible women to marry utterly awful men. The converse

phenomenon — I mean, nice, good guys marries to females of the

rhymes-with-rich subspecies — while by no means unknown, seems to me to be

much less common. However, this is all impressionistic. Hard to see how it

could be otherwise. How could you gather statistics on something like this?

Robert Graves, who knew a thing or two about women, celebrated (?) that

first kind of match in a poem:

A Slice of Wedding Cake

by Robert Graves

Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls

Married impossible men?

Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,

And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.

Repeat ‘impossible men’: not merely rustic,

Foul-tempered or depraved

(Dramatic foils chosen to show the world

How well women behave, and always have behaved).

Impossible men: idle, illiterate,

Self-pitying, dirty, sly,

For whose appearance even in City parks

Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.

Has God’s supply of tolerable husbands

Fallen, in fact, so low?

Or do I always over-value woman

At the expense of man?

Do I?

It might be so.