By Dorothy Dix
A young woman writes to me:
“I am in love with a splendid man who wishes to marry me, but I am afraid to marry because of the life I have seen my father and mother lead.
“They have always been unhappy together. Our home has been a place of strife and of continual quarrels between them, which leaves my mother in tears.
“So I stand shivering on the brink of matrimony, without the courage to take the fatal plunge.”
Tut, tut, my child. Don’t let the exhibit of matrimony that you have been forced to witness scare you off. Because your parents have made a failure instead of a success of matrimony is no reason why you should. Every marriage is as much an individual experiment as if it were the first one that had ever taken place in the world. Whether a man and woman get misery or bliss out of it depends on how much brains and heart and backbone they put into it, not on precedent.
There are no sure-fire successes in any line of human endeavor. There is always the chance and the danger of failure. “Nothing risk, nothing have,” applied to matrimony as well as fortune, and we are poor sports if we are not willing to at least sit in at the greatest game of hearts and try our luck.
But, without doubt, the reason that there is such a “decline and fall off” in matrimony, as Mr. Weg might say, is because of the Awful examples that we see so often about us. For most of the wedding bells now are rung by that immature and reckless, too inexperienced to realize the danger they run. Older men and women “looking about, and seeing what they see of domestic life, find nothing that sells the holy estate to them.
When father speaks to mother as he would not to any other woman on earth; when he treats her with less consideration than he would show a dog, when he haggles with her over many a penny, and abuses her about the size of the bills as if she were to blame for the cost of supporting a family, he doesn’t make a husband seem a desirable possession to his daughters. And when they do marry they do it with their fingers crossed, hoping that they will have better luck than their mother did.
When Maud goes to see her married sister Jane, she sees another Awful Warning. Jane was so pretty and so light-hearted and full of fun. She was so much in love and so sure she was getting the Fairy Prince, and that they were going to live happily ever afterward. And Jane is so thin and worn now, and so spiritless, and so shabby, and she tries hard to please a grumpy and grouchy husband, who never notices how she looks, or praises anything she does for him, and who never takes her anywhere or tries to bring any pleasure or amusement into her life.
“Thank God I haven’t got that,” says Maud piously. “John is a good man, but he is poor husband, and there doesn’t seem to be any way you can tell ‘em on the safe side of the altar.”
And Betty, who works downtown among men, and who knows men and their tricks and their manners; who has had married men try to flirt with her; who sees elderly philanderers having affairs with girls the age of their own granddaughters, who hears the lies men telephone their wives and sees the money spent on chicken feed that is needed to keep a man’s family comfortable; well, Betty looks at each one of these as she would at a red lantern that warned her of the abyss of misery into which she might fall if she got married.
The principal reason why men also fight shy of matrimony is because they too see plenty of Awful Examples.
When Tom goes to see his married chum and finds a messy house cluttered with the children’s playthings and old clothes and newspapers; when he sits down to ta dinner that would poison an ostrich, and looks at Tom’s sloppy wife across the table, there is nothing in it that makes him want to establish a home of his own.
When Sam sees the man next to him worn and harassed, working himself to death to pay the bills of an extravagant wife who, like the daughter of the horse leech, cried “More! More!” He doesn’t feel like selling himself into slavery to milliners and dressmakers to gratify any woman’s vanity.
When Henry goes out with the Joneses, and Mrs. Jones whines and frets and is peeved about everything, and knocks poor old Jones for everything from the state of the weather to the menu at the restaurant, Henry chuckles to himself as he lets himself into his bachelor apartment, and says “Not for me! No matrimony for me! I have had an Awful Warning that has put me off of it for life.”
And these ‘fraid-cats’ forget that there are also Good Examples that there are peaceful, happy homes and husbands and wives who love each other, who put each other’s happiness before their own, who find joy in companionship, and who count even sacrifice sweet when they make it for each other.
For marriage is what we make it. We take out of it what we put into it, and there is no marriage that would not be a success if a husband and wife, working together, really tried to make it one.
From page 12 of the Durham Morning Herald, Saturday, May 30, 1924
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