Should husbands and wives try to correct each other’s faults and improve each other?
It would seem that there could be but one answer to this question. Every human being who posses a grain of intelligence must desire to progress, to learn, to become better educated and more cultured. This being true, it seems that one of the sacred obligations of matrimony is for the stronger one of a married couple to reach out a helping hand to a weaker one and help lift him or her up to the higher life.
More than that, it would seem that the inferior one of a married couple would be eager to sit at the feet of the superior one and learn all that he or she had to teach and that he or she would feel that no criticism could come go graciously as that which was inspired by love and an ardent desire for his or her own good.
Nothing, however, could be further from the state of the case. Neither husbands nor wives accept with gratitude a few well intentioned hints about their manners and habits. The minute either a man or a woman attempts to turn matrimony into a mutual improvement society it becomes a scrapping match. Neither a vamp for the Demon Rum can break up a home so quickly as can a critic on the hearth.
It is a great pity that men and women refuse the gift that their husbands and wives yearn to bestow upon them because so often it is the magic talisman that would bring them the success they crave. Sometimes, for instance, a woman comes from a much better family than the man she marries. She is better educated and has had far wider social advantages than he has had.
He has great native ability. He has push and enterprise, all the qualities that enable a man to climb high, but he will never reach the topmost rung because he is handicapped by his lack of early advantages. He is shy on grammar and short on pronunciation. He is like a bull in a china shop in a drawing room, and hopelessly befuddled by the silver on the dinner table.
His wife would like to call his attention to his lapse in grammar and pronunciation and tech him beautiful English. She would like to instruct him in table etiquette and help him to acquire the little niceties of manner that distinguish the gentleman from the boor. But she dares not to do it, for at the very first suggestion that he change his ways she sees that she has wounded him to the quick, or else he flies into a rage that makes it impossible ever to reopen the subject unless she is one of those women who are born fighters and enjoy a domestic scrimmage.
Nor are wives any more amenable than husbands to criticism. It is a very common thing for a man to marry out of his class under the fatuous belief that he will have no difficulty at all in making over his wife according to his taste. A man who is cultured in mind, elegant in manner, fastidious in dress, will often choose as a wife a girl whose pretty face has captured his fancy, but who is uneducated, untaught, loud of voice and bold of manner, and who knows neither how to dress or to conduct herself in society.
Her husband would like to polish his rough diamond, but he attempts to do so at his peril. If he suggests that she try to imitate the quiet charm of manner of some old woman friend of his, she becomes green-eyed with jealousy. If he finds fault with her clothes and tells her that real ladies do not wear flamboyant garments that shriek to the beholder, she goes into hysterics. If he tried to get her to read and study, she weeps that he is tired of her and no longer loves her.
And, after having proven by his failures that no husband can improve his wife, he gives up on the hopeless task and settles down to make the best of his bad bargain or else repudiates it, according to the type of man he is.
Certainly it is tragical that a woman cannot tell her husband that he eats his soup audibly, or that he has told the same old stories over and over again until people flee at his approach. For if she could save him from being a laughing stock among his acquaintances.
Certainly, it is a tragedy that a man cannot tell his wife that when she paints herself up like a barn door, and dyes her hair the color of strawberry jam, she makes of herself a figure of fun, and that she bores people to death talking about her children. For if she would listen to him it would save her from being ridiculed wherever she went. Bur neither husband nor wife dare offer a word of honest criticism for far of bringing on a scene, and being accused of nagging. Perhaps the reason that husbands and wives are so much more sensitive to criticism from each other than they are from any one else is because their vanity cannot stand the knowledge that they are not perfect in the other one’s eyes. Their self-complacency cannot endure the shock of finding out that the other one things that they need any improvement.
In the days of courtship the man has told the woman that she was an angel, that she was a far above other women as the stars are above the earth, and that she was the most beautiful and gifted and marvelous being ever created. The woman marries him expecting to listen to this paean of praise the balance of her life, and naturally she doesn’t enjoy the douche of cold water she gets when her husband begins telling her of her faults, and suggests remodeling her character, her manners and her habits.
Before marriage the woman has put in many solid working hours kowtowing before the man, and telling him how big and wise and strong and great he is, and he assumed her support for life in order to have ever at his side a competent incense burner. Is it any wonder, then, that he is chagrined when he find out that his wife considered him a subject for reformation instead of admiration.
All of us know that the world at large has a keen eye for our weaknesses and a dull one for our virtues. The thing we really marry for is to secure for our own the one person who really admires us, and our vanity will not permit us to see that that person also sees our faults. That is why husbands and wives cannot offer each other helpful and constructive criticism.
--Dorothy Dix
From page 7 of the Durham Morning Herald, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 1924
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn84020730/1924-10-29/ed-1/seq-7/
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