Part 23

At a time of life when we consider a lad’s judgment too immature for him to make a thousand-dollar investment, we assume that he is worldly wise enough to pick out a life mate. At an age when we think a girl’s taste too unformed and too hectic to select her own clothes, we let her choose a husband.

Isn’t the casual attitude we take toward matrimony queer?

Marriage is the most important act in our lives, the thing that not only makes or mars us, but that affects thousands of people yet to be. Compared with marriage, being born is a mere episode in our careers, and dying a trivial incident. Yet there is no other thing that we do to which we give as little intelligent, serious thought.

If we were going into a business partnership to invest our entire fortune, we would think a long time before we committed ourselves. We would consider the proposition from every angle. We would look into its weak spots and try to form an honest opinion of its chances of success. And we would investigate the past record of the man we were proposing to go into business with, and find out everything about him.

We would ascertain what sort of a life he had led, how honest and honorable he was, how much he was to be trusted, and what sort of a disposition he had, whether he was pleasant to get along with or not. Yet the worst harm that our business partner could do us would be to cheat us out of our money. He couldn’t break our hearts and make our lives miserable. If we didn’t like him, we could dissolve the partnership without any trouble or disgrace.

But nine times out of ten those who enter into the marriage contract, which is the most binding contract of all, do not take the trouble to make even the slightest investigation about the one with whom he or she is making a life partnership. Every day we read of people who discover that they are married to bigamists. Every day some husband stumbles into his wife’s skeleton closet, and finds that the woman whom he believed pure and innocent has a dark and sordid past. Every day some agonized mother looks at her deformed or idiotic babe, and sees that the sins of the father have been visited on her child.

The man was handsome, and he danced well, and he had a dandy sport model car. The girl was pretty, and she had a cute trick of looking up through her lashes, or a baby stare, so they got married without bothering to find out a single thing about the kind of life each had led before they met. They wouldn’t have bought a house without having had an expert see that its title was clear and that there was no mortgage on it, but they will marry without finding out what sort of encumbrances are on the lives of their husbands and wives. They wouldn’t buy a horse or a dog without looking into its pedigree and finding out what sort of stock it comes from, and whether it is sound in wind and limb, but they will pass diseased blood on to their children with no thought of the sort of heredity with which they are cursing them.

Isn’t it queer that men and women fail to consider the dispositions of those they marry? Yet that is the thing that people have to live with, and it is what makes marriage a success or a failure. It isn’t high and noble principles; it isn’t truth and honor and honesty that makes or mars a man’s or woman’s happiness in marriage. It is the temper of their husbands or wives. A man may be a model of all the virtues, and yet if he is stingy and grouchy and gloomy, his wife will be miserable with him. A woman may be as chaste as Cæsar’s wife, yet if she nags, her husband will rue the day he led her to the altar.

All men and women know this, yet a girl will go along and marry a man who even before marriage gets the sulks over every little thing that goes wrong, with whom she has to always walk on eggs to avoid riling him, and who carries his small change in a purse with a snap lock. And a man will marry a thin, nervous, irritable girl, who is always getting peeved about everything, and who never can say a thing and let it rest. And they both wonder after marriage why marriage is a failure, and why they can’t get along together.

Isn’t it queer that people don’t pick out the kind of husbands and wives that they want, and that will suit them?

A man who is a student will marry a silly little girl who hasn’t two ideas in her head to rub together. In the days of courtship it was inevitable that he should take the measure of her brainlessness and find out that when he talked to her of books that he spoke of an unexplored world to her, and that when he discussed the things in which he was interested she yawned in his face. Nor could he help perceiving that her chatter was the chatter of a magpie, and the things in which she delighted were things that bored him stiff.

His common sense shrieked to him that marriage between two people who had not one single idea, nor an ideal, nor a thought, nor a desire, in common was bound to be a failure. But the man, wise and sophisticated in other things, but clinging blindly to his superstitious belief in the potency of the marriage ceremony, refused to heed the warning.

Somehow, he was confident that just getting married would change a silly, ignorant girl into an intellectual woman who would be a fit companion to him; miraculously render one who had never even read a sixth best-seller familiar with the world’s best literature, and make her prefer to discuss world topics to gossip about the people next door.

We wonder why poor men marry fashion-plates; why men who love to eat, marry girls who loathe the kitchen; why quiet, domestic men marry girls who live to dance and go to cabarets. They are all poor, blind heathen, trusting in the marriage ceremony to make an extravagant girl economical, a frivolous girl serious, an undomestic girl domestic.

Isn’t it queer? Not only do we superstitiously believe in the power of the marriage ceremony to change other people, but we actually think it will change ourselves.

The philanderer believes that he will never cast a roaming eye at another woman as soon as he is married. The loafer believes that he will be filled full of pep and energy by the mere fact of having a wife to work for. The stingy, selfish man is confident that he will enjoy spending money on his family. The girl who has never thought of anything but dolling herself up and having a good time believes that as soon as she is married she won’t care any more for fine clothes or going about, and that she will be perfectly satisfied to stay at home and save her husband’s money and cook him good things to eat.

But alas! the miracle of the marriage ceremony no more works on us than it does on those we marry. Long before the honeymoon has waned we make the discovery that somehow the mysterious something that was to change us didn’t take, and that we are the same old individuals, with the same old tastes and desires that we always had. Then to so many comes the cold, bitter knowledge that they are tied for life to one who is utterly uncongenial, to one who bores them and gets upon their nerves. And, queerest of all is it that no matter how unhappily people have been married, when death or divorce sets them free, they nearly all want to try matrimony over again!

XXXV

HUSBANDS—THE LIVING CONUNDRUM

A woman writes me that she has been married to a man for sixteen years, yet she has never got acquainted with him. She says he is good and kind, but indifferent to her. He never finds fault with her and never praises her. He spends his evenings at home by his own fireside, but a mummy would be just about as conversational. All of this has got the woman guessing, and she can’t figure out whether her husband still cares for her or not, or whether he regards his marriage as a success or a failure.

Good gracious, sister, don’t imagine for an instant that you have anything unique in the way of a husband! All men are full of curious peculiarities, and no woman ever gets acquainted with one, no matter whether she has been married to him for sixteen years or sixty. For, as an old colored friend of mine says: “Husbands is the most undiscovered nation of people there is.”

No woman ever understands, for instance, why it is that a man who was an ardent and impetuous wooer turns into a husband with about as much sentiment and pep to him as a cold buckwheat cake, as soon as the marriage ceremony is said over him. Nor can she form any idea of why the man who was willing to risk his life to get her takes so little interest in her after he has got her. She cannot doubt that he loved her, because he gave great and indisputable proof of that by assuming her support for life. Nor can she see any reason for his change of attitude. She still carries the same line of bait with which she caught him. She still has the same eyes that he likened to violets drenched in dew, but he doesn’t notice them. She still has the same white hands that he used to hold by the hour, but if she wants anybody to hold them now she has to hunt up some man to whom she is not married. No woman can ever understand why a man doesn’t put forth the same effort to make his home a going concern as he does to make his business or profession a success.

If every man tried to sell himself to his wife as he does to his employer, or a big customer, or a valuable client, there would be no disgruntled, dissatisfied married women in the world. If every man studied his wife’s peculiarities of disposition; if he played on her weaknesses as deftly and handled her as tactfully as he does a merchant who is about to place a big order, or a rich patient, every wife in the land would be eating out of her husband’s hand. If every man paid his wife a fair wage for her services, as he does his stenographers and clerks, it would take the heaviest curse off matrimony for millions of wives.

But, altho to have a contented wife and a peaceful and happy home means more to a man than to make a million dollars, not one man in a hundred ever gives any real serious thought or makes any honest effort to make his marriage a success. He leaves the most important thing in his life to chance, and he wins out or loses, according to whether fortune is with him or not. Women never can understand why their husbands refuse to handle them diplomatically, when it would be money in their pockets to use the velvet glove instead of the strong-arm method.

Every man knows that he can jolly his wife into doing anything, and doing without anything. He knows that if he hands her a few cheap compliments about what a wonderful manager she is and how she helps him, she will squeeze every nickel. Every man knows that if he tells his wife how beautiful and lovely she looks in her last year’s dress, she wouldn’t trade it off for the latest Paris importation. Every man knows that he can kiss his wife’s eyes shut until she will be blind as a bat, and that he has only to give her a warm smack on the lips to make her dumb as an oyster.

And every wife knows that her husband knows these things about her, because she has furnished him with a complete diagram about how to work her. And she never knows whether to be mad at him or disgusted with him, because he would rather fight with her and pay for it in having to eat bad meals, and having his money wasted and buy her new frocks and limousines and pearls, than to take the trouble to flatter her a little and treat her the way she is begging to be treated.

Most of all, women never can understand why their husbands are so stingy with words, which surely are among the cheapest commodities on earth. Above everything else, every wife yearns for words of love, for words of praise from her husband. Just to have her husband pet her, to have him say to her that she grows dearer and dearer to him every day, and that he thanks God for giving her to him, pays any woman for all the sacrifice, all the work, all the suffering that marriage brings her. It makes her heart sing with joy, and the lack of it fills her life with tears of despair.

Every man knows this. Every man knows that he can make his wife happy with just a few words, and yet he withholds them. Even the men who really love their wives and appreciate all that their wives do for them refuse to give the starving souls the words that would be the bread of life to them. No. No wife ever gets acquainted with her husband. Husbands always keep us guessing to the end of the chapter. Perhaps that is why we all want one of these living conundrums.