XXIII
WOMAN’S GREATEST GIFT
A man told me the other day that he had not married until he was forty-five years old because he was determined not to marry any woman who did not have a sense of humor, and it took him that long to find one.
A wise man! A very Solomon among men! May his tribe increase! It is a million times more important for a woman to have a well-developed funny bone than it is for her to have a Grecian profile, yet when men go to marry they pick out a girl for a wife because she has melting black eyes, or soulful blue eyes, without ever once observing whether the said eyes look on the funny side of life or take a dark, pessimistic, bilious view of it. Which is one of the reasons that domestic life is no merry jest to the average husband.
A sense of humor is desirable in a man, but it is absolutely essential for a woman to have a sense of humor if she is to be an agreeable life partner, because a woman’s existence is made up of little, nagging things, at which she must either laugh or cry, and if she can’t laugh them off, they get on her nerves, and she goes to pieces.
It is the neurotic, haggard women, who can’t see a joke even after it is diagrammed for them, who fill the insane asylums and the sanitariums and divorce courts. The women who wear the smile that won’t come off, and whose laughter is set on a hair trigger, get to be fair, fat and forty, and you couldn’t pry their husbands away from them with a crowbar. It is the lack of a sense of humor that causes women to make tragedies instead of comedies out of trifles.
Take the servant trouble, for instance. Women worry themselves sick over the mistakes of a green maid, and it never occurs to them that the very blunders that they are shedding tears over are screamingly funny contretemps that they pay out money to see imitated in a sketch on the vaudeville stage.
Of course, no one wants the soup to be seasoned with sugar instead of salt, nor the waste-paper basket to be put on the mantel as a parlor ornament as a perpetual thing, but the mistress who can get a laugh instead of a sick headache out of the mistakes of her Norah or Dinah, fresh from Ireland or the cotton fields, saves her own face and that of the maid whom she later trains into being a good servant.
Moreover, a woman with a sense of humor can take the curse off of even bad cooking, for there is not one of us who would not rather sit down to a boiled dinner with a jolly woman, full of good stories and anecdotes, than to attend a banquet where the hostess is gloomy and peevish and whiny, and who frets with her children and spats with her husband.
Whether a woman makes a success or failure of matrimony depends altogether on whether she has a sense of humor or not. If she can see her husband as one of the most mirth-provoking, side-splitting, uproarious human jokes that nature ever perpetrated she will be happy, and he will bless heaven on his knees for having given him the paragon of wives. But if she sees him as an Awful Problem, or a subject for reformation, neither one of them will ever know a happy hour, and the marriage will either end in a divorce court or a long endurance contest.
The women who wreck marriages are the ones who take their husbands seriously, and who get tragic every time their husbands look at another woman, or play a little poker, or fail to come home at the appointed hour, and who weep when their husbands forget an anniversary, or fail in some little attention they consider their due. The women who keep their husbands enslaved from the altar to the grave are the women who laugh with their husband over their little faults and peculiarities. They make a joke of their husband’s weakness for a pretty face; they have a dozen funny stories to tell about how they helped their husbands out of scrapes, and, instead of feeling ill-used and assuming the pose of a domestic martyr when their husbands forget their birthdays, they go out and buy themselves a particularly nice present, which they pay for without a murmur because they know that a wife with a sense of humor is worth anything she costs.
A sense of humor is even more necessary to a mother than it is to a wife. The humorless woman takes her children too tragically. They wear her out, and she alienates them from her by her ceaseless nagging because she thinks that every little foolish thing they do is full of direful significance. The mother with a sense of humor knows that youth is as subject to certain follies as it is to the mumps and the measles and the whooping cough, and that it must go through these experiences, as it did through the cycle of infantile diseases, but that they are not fatal if they are carefully watched.
She may not approve of all the manifestations of flapperism and jellybeanitis, but she knows that the remedy for them is laughter and not tears, and so she keeps her young ones in bounds with good-natured ridicule. Nor does she break her heart with dismal forebodings about the terrible fate that is bound to overtake boys and girls who do not dress and act as did their grandparents. She has seen too many silly young people develop into fine men and women to borrow trouble worrying over what is going to become of the race.
In its last analysis, a sense of humor is just the sense of proportion that enables us to see things in their true relation to life. It is the thing that keeps us from making mountains out of molehills, and that gives us the courage to smile instead of cry. Happy the woman who has this gift, and thrice happy the man who gets her for a wife.