XXXIV
QUEER THINGS ABOUT MARRIAGE
Did you ever think how many queer things there are about marriage? To begin with, isn’t it queer that we permit boys and girls to get married at an age at which they are not permitted to make any other binding contract? The law appoints guardians to look after the property of minors, and prevent them from squandering it, or being cheated out of it by sharpers, but there is no legal safeguard to save foolish girls and boys from throwing away their life’s happiness on an ill-advised marriage.
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!