A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.

The line suggests a hard-earned, experiential view of romantic judgment: only by encountering harmful or unsuitable partners does one learn to recognize and value a genuinely good one. It frames disappointment as a kind of education—painful but clarifying—implying that gratitude and discernment often arise from contrast rather than innocence. The phrasing also reflects a mid‑20th‑century, heteronormative idiom in which women’s romantic choices are treated as a rite of passage, and it can be read critically as normalizing “bad men” as a near-inevitable stage. Still, its enduring appeal lies in its concise articulation of learning through missteps and recalibrating one’s standards.