What did Benjamin Franklin say about marriage?

Marriage was a subject on which I wrote with some conviction — and, I confess, considerable amusement at those who argued against it. In my Reply to a Piece of Advice, I took direct aim at a poet who called marriage "a complete curse" and every woman "a tyrant." I found the argument both ill-natured and foolish. Consider what I said of the bachelor who dies without having raised a family: “what old Batchelor can die without Regret and Remorse, when he reflects upon his Death-bed, that the inestimable Blessing of Life and Being has been communicated by Father to Son through all Generations from Adam down to him, but in him it stops and is extinguished”. A grim picture, and one I believed entirely accurate. As for the supposed "bondage" of married life, I offered this comparison in the same piece: the cares of marriage are “like the Bondage of having a beautiful and fertile Garden, which a Man takes great Delight in”. Bondage, indeed! I also set down practical counsel in my Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness, calling the married state “the surest and most lasting Foundation of Comfort and Love”. And to a young friend I later wrote simply: "Treat your Wife always with Respect." “It will procure Respect to you, not from her only, but from all that observe it” Marriage, in short, is an institution maligned chiefly by those who have managed it badly.