IX
SPOILING A WIFE
A man asks: “Can a husband be too good to his wife?” Yes. A husband can be too good to his wife. So can a wife be too good to her husband. Husbands and wives are just as easily spoiled as babies are, and they react to spoiling exactly the same way that babies do. They become peevish, and fretful, and unreasonable. They howl for the moon. The more they are given in to, the more they demand and the more unrelenting their tyranny becomes. They smash things in sheer wantonness, and they need nothing on earth so much as to be turned across somebody’s knee and given a good spanking, and made to behave themselves.
All of us know plenty of men and women, with many fine and noble qualities, who would have made splendid husbands and wives if they had not been badly spoiled by their overindulgent wives and husbands. But instead of being disciplined, and forced to control themselves, and made to act like reasonable human beings, they had their weaknesses indulged, their selfishness encouraged, their exactions given in to, until they became a curse to themselves and to those who had the misfortune to be married to them.
Of course, when my correspondent speaks of a man being “good” to his wife, he means it in the sense of being indulgent to her. No man can be too good to his wife in the way of being kind, and tender, and sympathetic, and just, and fair to her. But he is not good to her—in fact, he does her a cruel wrong—when he is overly indulgent to her. He ruins her life no less than his own because the spoiled wife is never happy. She is always discontented, restless, dissatisfied, wanting something she hasn’t got and that is just beyond her reach. She thinks only of herself, and her pleasures, and the self-centered can always find flaws in their lot. The only contented wives are those who are doing their part toward making their marriage a success. The grafting wives are always whiny, and complaining, and disgruntled.
A man, for instance, is too good to his wife when he lets her lie down on her end of the matrimonial partnership. His part of the contract is to work and make the money to support a home. Her part is to make a comfortable home. There are many women who refuse to do this, and who force their husbands to live around in boarding houses and hotels. There are many more women who are so lazy and shiftless that they keep their houses as dirty as pigstys, and never give their husbands a meal that isn’t a first-aid to the undertaker. There are men who have to get up and get their own breakfasts before they start to business, while their good-for-nothing wives slumber and sleep. There are men who have to come home after a hard day’s work and help get the dinner, and wash the dishes, and bathe the baby, and sweep the floors, and do all the housework that their trifling wives have left undone.
Nothing but being a bedridden invalid excuses a woman for not doing her share of the work and for not feeding her family on properly cooked food, and any man is very silly who puts up with slack housekeeping from an able-bodied wife. She would get busy quickly enough with the broom and the cookbook if she knew she would lose her job unless she made her man comfortable.
A man is too good to his wife—or too bad to her—when he lets her ruin him with her extravagance. There are men of ability, men who are industrious, men who are filled with ambition and who were on the high road to success when they married. But they got spenders and wasters for wives, and thereafter their lives became just a frantic struggle to keep even with the bill collector. Strive as they would, they could never get ahead. They had to let every opportunity pass them because they never had a cent to put into any enterprise. Every dollar had gone to pay for the wife’s clothes, and entertaining, and trying to keep up with people better off than they.
The man who never says “No” to his wife’s ceaseless demands on his pocketbook may think that he is being good to her, but in reality he could do her no worse turn. For you can no more satisfy a greedy woman than you can a greedy child. Such women are the daughters of the Scriptural horse leech, forever crying: “More, more, more!” And in the end, when the crash comes, the extravagant wife is crushed under the ruin she has brought upon her household.
A man is too good to his wife when he makes all of the sacrifices and she monopolizes all of the privileges. There are households in which the husband has no rights or consideration whatever. He goes shabby, while wife is arrayed like Solomon in all his glory. He walks, while wife rides around in a limousine. He stays at home, while wife goes forth to summer and winter resorts. His tastes, his comfort, his pleasure are never considered. He cultivates selfishness in his wife by never demanding a square deal from her and by never making her give as well as take. And his reward is his wife’s contempt, for no woman respects a man upon whom she can wipe her feet.
Oh, yes, a man can easily be too good to his wife. The really good husbands are not those who make spoiled babies of their wives, but those who encourage their wives to develop into self-controlled, helpful, useful women.