Dorothy Dix—her book

A young woman wants to know whether it is better to marry the man she loves, or the man who loves her. Both, I should say. Marriage should be a mutual benefit association in which both parties give and receive; in which they love and are loved in equal measure. Cupid, however, is no dispenser of justice. He rarely holds the scales even. Very few husbands and wives feel the same amount of affection for each other. In almost every married couple one kisses and the other submits to being kissed, as the French proverb cynically puts it.

This being the case, it is better for the woman to be the kisser than the kissee, because, while it is misfortune to a woman never to be loved, it is a tragedy to her never to love.

Of course, every woman desires to be worshiped by some man, and she dreams of having a husband who will be a perpetual lover and spend his life laying tributes at her feet. She feels that she would be perfectly happy doing the goddess-on-a-pedestal act, and occasionally deigning to bestow a kind word on her adorer, as one throws a bone to a dog. Obsessed by this romantic vision, which flatters her vanity, many a woman is beguiled into marrying a man for whom she has only a mild liking because he is so crazy about her. She thinks that he can supply enough love for two, and that she will be happy and satisfied with just being loved.

It does not take her long to find out that she has made a sad mistake, and that there is nothing with which we can get so easily satiated as we can with the affection we do not return. We have no appetite for it and it is tasteless in our mouths. Nor are there any greater bores than those who love us, who cling to us, who want to be always with us, but whom we do not love and of whom we get tired to death.

All of us know doormat husbands whose wives ruthlessly trample them under foot. We all know peevish, disgruntled, discontented wives, whose husbands slave to give them luxuries for which they never get so much as—“Thank you.” We have all held up our hands in horror when some wife left a good, devoted husband and eloped with another man or packed her trunk and hiked out for Hollywood, and we wondered what was the matter with these women that they were not satisfied with their husband’s love.

The trouble with them was that they had married men who loved them instead of men they loved. If they had been doing the love-making and trying to hold the affections of husbands whom they suspected every flapper of trying to steal from them, they would have been too busy, too thrilled and interested to get into mischief.

There are many reasons why a woman who is contemplating matrimony should lay greater stress upon the state of her own affections than she does upon the man’s. The principal one, of course, is because a woman is ten times as much married to her husband as he is to her, and therefore it is ten times more important that she should be pleased with her bargain than it is that he should be satisfied with his.

A married man has a million interests, and distractions, and amusements, and compensations outside of his home, and if his wife does not turn out to be all that his fondest fancy painted her, he has his business to fall back upon, his ambition and his career to console him. He is never wholly dependent on his wife for his happiness. But a woman stakes her all on her matrimonial gamble, and if she does not love her husband, if she does not find happiness in her home, she has nothing.

A woman’s emotions make her life. What she feels is of more interest to her than what she does. She cannot substitute liking for loving any more than she can water for wine. And no matter how much she admires the man to whom she is married, no matter how grateful she is to him for his kindness to her, unless he can raise a thrill in her breast everything is cinders, ashes and dust to her.

She feels that she has missed the best thing in life, the thing she most wanted; and she is restless and dissatisfied, and is forever on a still hunt to find her real soul-mate.

To the average woman, marriage is a state of perpetual sacrifice. She must go through the agony of bearing children, and the long, weary years of ceaseless care and anxiety in rearing them. She must work harder than any hireling at the dull and monotonous task of cooking and cleaning and scrubbing and sewing and mending that it takes to make a comfortable home. And the only thing on earth that can make all of this worth while is love for her husband. That sets a star in her sky. That gilds the humblest task. The woman who stands over a stove cooking a dinner for the husband to whom she is utterly indifferent is a slave driven to her appointed task by her sense of duty. The woman who stands over a stove cooking dinner for a husband she adores is a priestess making a burnt offering of herself on the altar of her god.

The woman who marries the man she loves is never bored, and boredom is the particular curse of the feminine sex. She throws herself heart and soul into her husband’s interests, and is more eager for his success than he is himself. She is never dull, because the smallest thing that concerns him is of more import to her than the events that shake the great outer world. She can find food for thought and scope for her activities in the fact that her husband likes onions with his beefsteak or prefers mushrooms. Her days are filled with pleasurable excitement in preparing for his homecoming of an evening, and when she hears his key in the latch her heart strikes up “Hail to the King.”

The woman who marries the man she loves is never dissatisfied, never disgruntled. He may be a poor thing, but he is her own, the one she cut out of the bunch and which she marked with her own brand. Having got the one thing she wanted most, she can well afford to pity her poor sisters who have only limousines and pearls and the merely tolerated husbands who are the purveyors thereof. A woman should always marry a man with whom she is very much in love, because it insures her a stimulating and interesting life. The reason that most women run down and get slack and slouchy is because they are bored to tears with domesticity. They do not care for their husbands and so they take no trouble to please them.

But the woman who is in love with her husband, who married the man she wanted, is on her tiptoes all of the time. She means to keep him and she takes no chances on disillusioning him with curl papers, and cold cream, and bad cooking, and tantrums. She is eternally in pursuit; and while there may be times when she gets tired and feels as if she would like to sit down and take things easy, still there is no denying that the love chase puts pep in any lady’s day.

A woman should never marry any man except the one with whom she is very much in love, because every woman craves romance, and if she doesn’t get it at home she is very apt to seek it abroad, or else she goes through life hungry, unsatisfied. The wives who get into scandals; who think they find soul-mates in their preachers, or their doctors, or long-haired poets; the wives who run off after strange cults and who burden down the mails with letters to movie actors are all women who married men they didn’t love.

The women who are crazily in love with their husbands make their own angel’s food at home and don’t have to go around trying to pick up stray crumbs on the street. Of course, the woman who loves her husband better than he does her has her moments of acute jealousy, but even these are full of ginger and are better than the dull stagnation of having a man that you don’t take the trouble to lock up at night because you know you can’t lose him.

Truly, it is more blessed to give than to receive, and it is better for a woman to love than to be loved.