XLI
TAKING HUSBANDS “AS IS”
I wish that I could make every young girl who gets married a present of a handsomely framed motto to hang on the wall above the mirror of her dressing table, where she would be compelled to see it every time she put on or took off her complexion, or repaired the Cupid’s bow of her lips. On this motto in gorgeously illumined letters would be these sapient words of Grover Cleveland: “It is a condition and not a theory that confronts you.” I can think of no other advice in the world that would be such a lamp to guide the feet of any young woman who is starting to blunder down the rough road of matrimony, as this cold, hard, unimaginative assertion of a simple fact. It brushes away with one gesture of common sense all the dreams and romances and fairy tales of courtship, and leaves a woman facing the reality of matrimony, which is never as she thought it would be. It just is as it is.
If women would only abandon their theories about what matrimony should be, and how husbands should act, and deal with them as they are, it would save floods of tears, innumerable broken hearts, hundreds of cases of nervous prostration, and put the divorce courts out of business. Furthermore, that women are mostly right in their contentions, and have logic and justice on their side, doesn’t alter this aspect of the situation at all. For instance, woman’s perpetual grievance against her husband is his indifference. She wails out that he inveigled her into matrimony under false pretenses because from the ardor with which he wooed her, he led her to believe and expect that he would be an eternal lover and would spend a large part of his time telling her how beautiful and wonderful she was, and how he adored her. Instead of making good on this antenuptial propaganda, however, he stopped all of his love-making at the altar with a suddenness that jarred her wisdom teeth loose, and in place of being a ladylove, she finds herself merely a household convenience.
Millions of women make themselves miserable because their husbands never make love to them, never pay them a compliment, never give them any sign of appreciation, never take them to any place of amusement, never give any indication that they still care for them and want them to be happy. These suffering sisters could save themselves nearly all of their woe if they would just throw their rosy dreams of how a husband should treat a wife into the discard, and accept the truth that very few men are sentimentalists. Most of them feel like fools when they are love-making, and so they get the ordeal over with as quickly as possible. They consider that when a man marries a woman, and undertakes her board bill and shopping ticket, that he has given a proof of devotion strong enough to draw money on at the bank, and there is no use in saying anything more about it. Also they feel that the fact that they selected the women they did for wives showed that they admired them above all other women, so why harp on that string? And, of course, they want their wives to be happy. What else do they toil for except to doll their wives up, and give them cars and houses and trips to Palm Beach?
So the wife may be very happy and contented who has philosophy enough to take her husband as he is, good, kind and generous, even if he is a dumb lover, apparently more interested in his business than he is in her. She realizes that he says it with checks instead of with flowery phrases, and that if she is starved emotionally she is sure of her daily roast beef and potatoes. Then there is the matter of adjustment between a man and a woman. Every bride dreams an impossible dream of a husband who is chilled steel to all the balance of the world, but putty in her hands. Experience blows this fair dream to the ends of the earth, and she finds that she can no more alter her husband’s habits and prejudices than she can the laws of the Medes and the Persians. He has his ways, and she can either give in to them or fight over them. He has his set opinions, and she can sidestep them or fight with him about them.
She can either use tact and diplomacy in handling him, or else be in a perpetual quarrel with him, and she protests that this isn’t fair or just. She says that it is as much his place to give in to her as it is hers to give in to him. That it is just as much his business to deal subtly with her, as it is her business to deal subtly with him. Of course, the woman is right, but being right doesn’t help her a bit in getting along with her husband. It is a condition and not a theory that confronts her. If any harmonious relations exist between her and her husband, she has to furnish the harmony. If there is any adapting, it is the wife who must do the adapting.
Women likewise complain that it is unjust that they should have to do practically all of the work of making a happy home. They say that it is just as much a man’s business to be a little ray of sunshine in the home as it is a woman’s; that it is just as much up to a husband to wear the smile that won’t come off as it is the wife’s. They say that there is no more reason why they should read up on subjects that interest their husbands, so as to be able to hand out a good line of conversation, than why their husbands shouldn’t read up on fashion journals so as to be able to discuss intelligently with them the length of skirts and the latest hair bob. True. But again it is the condition and not the theory of matrimony that confronts them, and unless the wife makes the happy home it isn’t made. It is when women forget what matrimony should be, and deal with it as it is, that they make a success of it.