For about a week there, the entire country was talking about Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York and future unemployed, lonely, divorced dad. I found the story as fascinating as everybody else did, following every revelation and press conference like it actually had some meaning to my own life.

The frustrating part for me, however, was the aftermath, as every talk show host, every commentator, and, most frustratingly, every wife in the country weighed in on why men are such rats. Suddenly, because some rich Neanderthal-looking jerk had gone off the reservation, every husband in America had to walk around under a cloud of suspicion.

I've explained to my wife I can't even afford the kind of escort that gets 18.5 miles per gallon, let alone the kind that costs $4,000 an hour, but I can't be heard over the avalanche of talking heads in the media. Suddenly, we're bombarded by studies and surveys, all trying to show what makes a happy marriage and why men are the problem.

For a new Gallup/USA Today poll, pollsters called thousands of homes and asked wives, out of the blue, whether, if their spouse were to be involved in a sex scandal, they'd stand by him during the inevitable press conference. Sixty- one percent answered they would force their husbands to face the media alone. Probably, the remaining 39 percent immediately hung up the phone, picked up a baseball bat and went looking for their husbands to find out whether the pollster knew something they didn't. My own wife commented that in such a situation, I would have to attend my press conference alone, but it might be hard for me to address the media with a kitchen knife lodged in my belly.

Still, marriage has its benefits. Another study last week showed happily married people have lower blood pressure than single people. (Four points lower, almost as good as switching to Promise margarine.) To determine this, they had both married and single people wear mobile blood pressure monitors for 24 hours and then tabulated the results.

The results were skewed by the fact 92 percent of married people, having already snagged a mate, don't mind looking stupid wearing a blood pressure monitor all day, while single people still have some reason to keep up appearances — at least if they don't want to buy Soup for One dinners forever.

Some studies I just find aggravating. A just released study in Israel found men who give in to their wives on major decisions were much happier overall than men who fought for control of the marriage. (Men who think they have any chance of getting control of the marriage, of course, are just idiots.) Another study, this time by the University of Michigan, found spouses who suppress their anger when being pushed around by their partner tend to die earlier.

Putting the two studies together, researchers found that 87 percent of American husbands have given over complete control of their lives, but are comforted by the fact that death is on the way.

Then of course there's the study published in the Journal of Family Psychology, which found, bizarrely enough, that the happiest families are those in which the husband is significantly uglier than his wife. There's very little information about how the researchers from the University of Tennessee, where the study originated, conducted their survey. I don't think they took the time to bring subjects in to the lab and rate them on a beauty scale. Just like every other survey, they probably just called random couples on the phone, asked them who was better looking in their particular pair-up, and then surveyed their happiness levels.

My bet is that any husband with even two or three brain cells would be smart enough, if asked by a college student over the phone, especially with his wife standing right there waiting to take her part in the survey, to say his wife was much, much, much better looking than he was. If they had a course in college called "Husband 101," it would be the first thing on the blackboard when students walked in the classroom.

The results of the study were a little skewed because those husbands who openly declared they were significantly better looking than their wives couldn't finish the survey.

It's really hard to talk with a kitchen knife in your belly.

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