Dear Miss Dix—I am a bachelor 35 years old. I have a woman friend of 26 with whom I have gone around with for several years and whom I have regarded as a good pal and chum, and nothing else. Three weeks ago this girl’s parents moved to a distant state. The evening before they left I took the girl to dinner, and I got the surprise of my life when she told me that she did not want to go away and leave me and that if I told her to stay she would be glad to do so, because she loved me above everything else.
I told her I didn’t care for her in that way and that she had better go on with her parents. But ever since she went away she has written me daily letters telling me how heart-broken she is without me and begging me to let her come to me.
Here is my problem: Shall I marry her, make her happy, and make myself miserable, or shall I tell her that I cannot marry her because I do not love her, and thus break her heart?
George S.
Answer:
When women take the initiative in love-making and pop the question, they have to take the risk of getting the mitten, just as a man does when goes a-courting. And men have to learn how to spunk up and say “No” to the women they don’t love and don’t want, just as women turn down a proposition from a man for whom they do not care.
You are in great danger, George, of wrecking your whole life, because you are so flattered at having a woman make love to you and propose to you that you are about to lose your head and do the most criminally foolish thing that a man can possibly do. And that is to marry a woman whom he doesn’t love because she loves him.
Lots of men do it. Lots of men have married women that they knew at the time were not suitable wives for them—women who didn’t belong to their strain of society, women who bored them, women they knew to be brainless little fools. But, the women clung to them and cried at the thought of being parted from them, and the poor, befuddled men didn’t have the backbone to break away from the clutching hands and flee from the tears and save themselves.
Don’t be this sort of weak, sentimental fool, George. Just realize this: that if you don’t love a woman before you marry her, you will come to hate her after you are tied to her, because every woman puts her best foot forward before the wedding. If she doesn’t charm you when she has got on her company clothes and her company manners, she will be actually repulsive to you when you see her in wrappers and curl papers, and when you have to put up with her nerves and her temper.
It takes a lot of love to enable anybody, and especially a man, to stand matrimony.
And don’t’ think that you will make the woman happy by marrying her when you don’t love her. A shanghaied husband is a poor substitute for a volunteer one. You will always resent her having to the better of you. You will always feel a burden, and you will let her know it. Besides, the chances are that some day you will meet the One Woman and fall in love with her.
Say “no” to the girl and stick to it, and don’t worry about her dying of a broken heart. They never do.
Dorothy Dix
From the society page of the Durham Morning Herald, Saturday, January 19, 1924
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