Men mourn for what they have lost women for what they ain’t got.

In this aphorism, Billings (the pen name of Henry Wheeler Shaw) uses a broad, comic generalization about gender to contrast two kinds of dissatisfaction: grief over a concrete loss versus longing for an imagined lack. The line plays on the idea that men are oriented toward what has been possessed and then taken away, while women are oriented toward what they feel they should have but do not. Like much of Billings’s dialect humor, the point is less sociological accuracy than a punchy, memorable reversal that exposes how people rationalize unhappiness—either by clinging to the past or by idealizing an unattained future.