If man knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they’d never marry.

The line trades on a comic, cynical premise: marriage depends partly on illusion, and the private lives of women—what they do, think, or desire when unobserved—might disrupt men’s romantic expectations. It belongs to a long tradition of gendered wit that frames courtship as a theater of appearances and suggests that intimacy is sustained by selective ignorance. Read critically, the joke also reveals the era’s anxieties about women’s autonomy and interiority: the “unknown” of women alone is treated as potentially threatening to male confidence and to the institution of marriage. As with much attributed epigrammatic humor, its punch relies on stereotype rather than observation.