Getting along with men isn’t what’s truly important. The vital knowledge is how to get along with a man, one man.

The line pivots from the general to the intimate: social fluency with “men” as a group is treated as secondary to the harder, more consequential work of sustaining a relationship with one particular person. Read in McGinley’s characteristic domestic-ironic register, it suggests that abstract theories about gender or broad social charm matter less than the daily negotiation of temperament, habit, and mutual obligation within a partnership. The repetition—“men… a man, one man”—tightens the focus, implying that love or marriage is not a sociological problem but a singular, ongoing practice of understanding and accommodation.