I never used to understand how rich old bastards ended up with 24-year-old beauty queens. Now I get it. I used to think that they, the girls, would be stuck licking old balls for the rest of his life, but it’s not about that. That happens because it’s easy. You marry one of your peers, everything is hard. There are expectations. It is more than just bringing home a paycheck, even if it is a huge paycheck. There are claims on your soul. You have to be there. You have to suffer together. That is not what many men are good at. Men are good at being engines of production. You make $5 million a year and someone is still on your ass about putting the dishes in the dishwasher and taking off your shoes. All my friends who are divorced are happy, especially the ones dating younger girls.

Why did we have children in the first place? We didn’t really think about it—it was just the thing to do. You get married, you have kids, that is what you do. Don’t think Katharine and I ever really had a serious conversation about it. It was just assumed. I love my kids, but if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t do it. Number one, it raises the stakes in a marriage; a childless couple can just walk away. Number two, it takes away your freedom. Look at Tod—early thirties, stud options trader, running all over the city, not a care in the world. And he takes a car home with the New Girl, which made me unexpectedly jealous.

Leading up to when J.R. was born last month—in retrospect—I should have been worried. We weren’t talking at all. I was working all the time, or out with brokers, and it just seemed like kid number four was on autopilot. We were pros at it by now, and there was room in the house and there was furniture and clothes and it was all going to be easy. Katharine went into labor that afternoon, and I slipped out of work and met her at the hospital, and she was just so weird about the whole thing, so distant, and I was so twisted up with what was going on at work that I never thought to ask, I never thought to ask about anything, what her life was like, her struggles, her fears, and it occurred to me as we sat there in the waiting room, me with my Sun Chips and Sprite, that I didn’t even know this woman anymore, that all this time she had her own life, and it was then that she started crying, maybe the second or third time I had ever seen her cry and I’m all what’s wrong and she tells me, she tells me that she was having sex with Michael the contractor earlier in the day when her water broke, and she cried, and I just kind of sat there, not saying anything, and the doctors came and took her and that is how I will always remember the birth of my youngest son.