XIII
TRIAL DIVORCE
I believe the one thing that would do more than anything else to stop the utter wrecking of homes and the half-orphaning of children, in the case of unhappy marriages, would be the institution of trial divorce and the refusal of the courts to make any divorce decree absolute under two years. For so many husbands and wives think they have ceased to love each other, when they are only too much fed up with each other’s society. So many persons think they long for freedom, when they only need a rest. So many persons think divorce a panacea for every ill, who find out, when they try it, that the remedy is worse than the disease.
The great majority of men and women are romantically in love when they get married, and they expect to live ever afterward in a state of storybook bliss. Then comes the inevitable disillusionment, when they find out that they have married ordinary human beings instead of angels and motion-picture heroes. Comes the clash of personalities. The fight of the selfish to get the best for one’s self. The rebellion at the sacrifices that matrimony demands.
The woman begins to nag. The man gets grouchy and surly. Each magnifies every fault of the other. Resentment and disappointment blot out every memory of love and tenderness, of goodness and nobility. They come to the point where they feel that they cannot stand each other a minute longer and rush off to the divorce courts.
But the ink is hardly dry on their decrees before they begin to view each other in a kindlier light. The man, living in his club or at a boarding house, wandering from restaurant to restaurant, hating the cooking and getting his digestion upset, begins to think of his ex-wife’s good points. How true and loyal and devoted she was! What a good cook and housekeeper! And he wonders that he didn’t have enough sense of humor to laugh at her nagging instead of letting it get on his nerves.
The woman, trying to make a home for herself with less money than she is accustomed to, bewildered and terrified at having to face life for herself, with no man to depend on, begins to recall her husband’s virtues instead of his faults, and to reflect that it is better to have even a husband who is short on compliments, and shy on attentions, and long on knocks, than to have no husband at all.
And in their secret souls both are conscience-stricken when they look at their children and see them lacking a mother’s or a father’s care and a real home. So there are thousands of couples who are merely disgruntled with each other who would come together again if a trial divorce gave them time in which the galled spots that the matrimonial yoke has made on their necks could heal and they could find out that they hadn’t got such bad teammates, after all.
The trial divorce would do much to solve even those cases in which husbands and wives think that they have fallen out of love with their lawful mates and have found their affinities in others. Nine times out of ten the reason that men and women lose their affection for their husbands and wives is just because they are bored with them. They have had an overdose of them. They have seen them too long and at too close range.
Every woman knows that when she starts off on her summer vacation she sees her husband as just a hump-shouldered, fat, bald-headed man, who is slouchy about dressing; but after she has been away a week she begins to remember what a classical nose he has. In a fortnight she thinks how handsome and distinguished-looking he is, and by the end of the month he is a perfect Valentino to her. The man has just the same reactions about his wife. She goes away fat and frumpy and middle-aged, and she returns merely plump and more attractive than any flapper to him.
Many men and women who think they are permanently tired of their husbands and wives are only temporarily weary of looking at the same face and listening to the same line of conversation across the breakfast table, and if a trial divorce gave them a second choice they would find that they preferred the old love to the new.
For the lure of the “other woman” and the “other man” is chiefly that they are unattainable and unknown, and these charms vanish before the trial divorce that makes them possible and familiar. It gives the foolish, infatuated husband and wife a chance really to compare the long-haired poet or the short-haired flapper with the partners they had and are about to lose.
Give a man time to forget his wife’s nagging, and his peaches-and-cream complexioned secretary will not look as good a risk, after all, to him as his faithful old wife. Give a woman time to forget the mean things her husband said to her when they quarreled, and she will think a long time before she exchanges her good provider for some impecunious glib love-maker.
The truth is, that few men and women find in divorce the solution of their woes that they expected. They picture it as a state of bliss in which they will be free of all woes and cares, an earthly paradise in which there will be no fretting wives or fault-finding husbands, and in which they will be able to do exactly as they please. But they find its golden apples Dead Sea fruit that turns to ashes on their lips. The man who has resented his wife’s tyranny and writhed under her curtain lectures, strangely finds out that he wants to go home, when he has no home to which to go, and nobody to care whether he ever comes back or not.
The woman who has thought she would be happy if she no longer had to live with a neglectful husband, finds that the world also neglects her and that her freedom has merely brought her the freedom of earning her own living. And when this hard and bitter knowledge soaks into the consciousness of men and women many of them would be glad enough to go back again to their old husbands and wives if they could.
So, when we unscramble our scrambled marriage laws, let’s put the trial divorce into them.