The phrase “Women: can’t live with them and can’t live without them” has a surprisingly deep lineage. The most ancient roots of the sentiment (perhaps not the exact wording), goes back to the Ancient Greek writer of comedy, Aristophanes, who expressed the core idea in Lysistrata in 411 B.C. Lysistrata is one of the most audacious comedies ever written and yet it was written during the brutal later years of the Peloponnesian War (Athens vs. Sparta) with the simple yet shocking premise that an Athenian woman named Lysistrata organizes the women of all the Greek city-states to go on a sex strike until their husbands end the war. Simultaneously, the older women seize the Acropolis and take control of the treasury, cutting off the war’s funding. The men are depicted as increasingly desperate and physically miserable. Aristophanes makes this very literal and comically visual until they finally capitulate and negotiate peace. The actors’ costumes made this visible to the entire audience. The men can barely walk (their giant leather phalluses getting in the way), can’t think straight, and are reduced to comic humiliation, the supposed masters of Athens brought low by biology. The play is one of the earliest antiwar protests and was a serious political statement wrapped in outrageous comedy. It was also one of the first proto-feminism Statements as Lysistrata argues that women are more rational about war than men, and that they bear its costs (dead sons and husbands) without any say in the decisions. For its time, this was a remarkable inversion of the social order. And let’s not ignore that as comedy it is genuinely, riotously funny, relying heavily on physical comedy, double entendre, and the spectacle of men rendered helpless by desire. During the Iraq War in the early 2000s, women’s groups staged readings worldwide of Lysistrata, with women weaponizing their domestic power to force political change. The idea has resonated across every era. Aristophanes actually includes the dialogue “Can’t live with them, or without them.”
The Romans followed suit as the poet Martial wrote something nearly identical in Latin around 80–100 A.D. To dredge up my four years of high school Latin, he said “nec tecum possum vivere nec sine te” or loosely translated as, “I can live neither with you, nor without you”. Martial was aiming his comment at a specific woman rather than women as a category, but the the point still translated well across the Adriatic. Then we move into the Renaissance where the version of the thought most commonly cited today is attributed to Desiderius Erasmus, the Renaissance humanist, whose remark reflects the complexities and contradictions of his era’s rigid social hierarchies and traditional gender roles. Erasmus obviously had less of a sense of humor than Aristophanes and less of a problematic wife than Martial. He lived during the 15th and 16th centuries when times were tougher (think plague and rats), and the phrase appears in his massive collection of classical proverbs and commentary. Whether he originated it or was simply transmitting an older Latin expression is debatable; he was a great synthesizer of classical wisdom. I think of Erasmus as the Middle Ages version of myself and my ponderings.
Enough history, let’s discuss the structure of the phrase itself. The phrase expresses a duality: a sense of frustration or difficulty in coexistence, paired with an acknowledgment of women’s essential and indispensable role in a happy life. Rather than vilifying or wholly venerating women, it dwells in the tension between dependence and irritation, need and challenge. That ambivalence is what has given it such extraordinary staying power. It isn’t really an insult to women so much as an admission of helplessness, which is what makes it pathetically funny about men. It appears in Animal House in 1978, said by (of all people), Flounder, so it was already a well-worn expression. Even The Muppet Movie opens a song with the exact lines applied to Miss Piggy. The bottom line: the sentiment is at least 2,400 years old, the Latin formulation is Roman, Erasmus popularized it in the Renaissance, and the English idiom as we know it has been circulating for centuries, long before anyone thought to put it on a bumper sticker.
While its true that “men and women are complicated”, or as John Gray said in Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus in 1992, the core argument is simple: men and women are so psychologically different that they might as well be from different planets, and most relationship conflict stems from failing to understand those differences rather than from bad intentions. It’s a universal paradox. Any person or thing you love enough to be genuinely frustrated by (a parent, a child, a best friend, your country…) triggers exactly this feeling. I mean, who hasn’t shown this frustration with a parent, child, friend, spouse, and perhaps especially lately…a country? The specificity of “women” is almost incidental. What endures is the structure: the thing that costs you the most is also the thing you can’t do without. It’s a degree of honesty about ambivalence that is rare. Most cultural expressions about love go one of two directions… idealization or bitterness. This phrase refuses both. It holds the contradiction open without resolving it, which is remarkably mature and rare. It doesn’t say women are wonderful or terrible. It says: both, simultaneously, and I’ve made my peace with that. That honesty is disarming. It also gives our frustration a dignified exit. For the person saying it, the phrase does something psychologically useful by acknowledging the difficulty inherent in the conflict while simultaneously conceding the necessity. It’s a way of complaining that contains its own surrender. You can’t really use it with genuine bitterness because the second half undermines you. It’s self-aware grumpiness, which is far more relatable than straight resentment. And it’s formally elegant. The structure of the phrase itself is satisfying in its parallel construction, the reversal, the verbal economy of it. It says something complex in very few words. Phrases with that kind of compression tend to survive because they’re easy to remember and fun to say.
Did anyone notice that yesterday Tulsi Gabbard resigned as the DNI for the Trump Administration? As noted all over the place, she is the fourth cabinet level person to resign in this term, and, indeed, the fourth woman. Did you also make note of the fact that she was marginalized in her role ever since she came out strongly against Trump’s Iran War? Was this a modern version of Lysistrata? Does Donald Trump hate women or love women?…now there’s a Greek tragedy waiting to be written.
The deeper truth at the bottom of it all is that the phrase reflects something Aristophanes, Erasmus, and every divorce lawyer since has understood: human beings are fundamentally ill-suited to intimacy and utterly dependent on it at the same time. That tension doesn’t resolve. It’s just the condition. In 1999 the phrase migrated cleanly onto computers. Then two decades later we find it used in reference to social media. It’s like Donald Trump…very versatile and can be used with virtually any relationship with a strong duality. Has someone who has been whipsawed by crypto said it yet? There’s another Trump love/hate affair for the general public. Who wants to bet that it will probably next apply to AI? I already hate Elon Musk and Sam Altman and love Dario and Claude…does that count?