XLVIII
THE LURE OF THE MARRIED MAN
A man wants to know why married men have such a fascination for girls, and wherein a benedict’s wooing differs from that of a bachelor. The first part of this double-barreled question was answered by Eve in the Garden of Eden, and every girl takes after her greatest grandmother. Married men are forbidden fruit, and that alone whets the appetite of the foolish little Evelyns for them, and makes them seem the prize pippins of the whole matrimonial orchard. The thing that a woman cannot have, that she has no right to have, and especially the thing that some other woman possesses, is always the thing that she wants most. If you have ever watched women fight over a commonplace and unattractive article on a bargain table, where each was determined to have it just because the others desired it, you have the psychological explanation of why a girl falls for a married man that she wouldn’t look at if he were single.
Also, women are the adventurous sex. They love to play with danger as a child plays with fire, and a large part of the lure of the married man consists in the fact that a girl knows that when she has an affair with one, she is risking every shred of her reputation, and gambling with her happiness, and that any minute she may be cited as a corespondent, and dragged into the slime of the divorce courts.
Also, the average girl is simply slopping over with romance, and somehow she gets more kick out of being wooed under the rose than she does in an above board, honest-to-God courtship. There is something about the secrecy of a love intrigue with a married man, about the surreptitious letters, about the stolen rendezvous, that thrills her to the core of her being. It makes her feel so desperately wicked, like one of the grand passion heroines of her favorite novels, who cried “All for love, and the world well lost” as she chucked her bonnet over the windmill.
It is because the married man is the only man in the world who is out of her reach, and whom she has no right to try to grab; it is because some other woman has set her seal of approval on him by marrying him; it is because an illicit love episode is a streak of lurid romance in her drab days, that the little Totties and Flossies are able to see the hero of their girlish dreams in the fat, bald-headed, middle-aged men for whom they work, and the Mauds and Gwendolyns imagine that they have found their affinities in some ordinary commonplace married man, who would bore them to tears if his wedding ring had not given him a fictitious value in their eyes.
Add to this, vanity and cruelty. In the man hunt, women look on the married man as big game, and when they bring one down they feel as if they had captured an elephant instead of having shot a tame rabbit. There are girls who boast of their conquests among married men, and who have so little heart that they delight in watching the agonies of jealousy that they inflict on the poor defenseless wife. Many young women are likewise gold-diggers, and these virtually confine their attentions to married men, as wealthy bachelors are few and well-to-do middle-aged married men are plentiful and easy.
Why the married man who starts out as a Lothario is an easy winner of feminine hearts is perfectly obvious. To begin with, he has the same advantage that the widower has over the single man. He is a professional, so to speak, instead of an amateur lover. He has the education in women that only marriage can give a man, for he has had a wife and, like the wise man of Kipling’s poem, he “learned about women from her.” He has found out that all women are so hungry for love that they will swallow any soft talk without examining its quality. He has found out that you can jolly a woman into anything. He has found out that women melt down into a mush that you can do with as you will, under a little understanding and sympathy. He has found out that if you remember an anniversary, and a woman’s taste in two or three things, she will believe it an absolute proof of undying devotion.
The married man knows that there is one sure short cut to virtually every woman’s heart. It is pity. And so he begins his love-making by telling the girl that his wife does not understand him, that she is not his real soul-mate, that they have nothing in common, and that his home is bleak, and barren, and unhappy. Generally he accuses his wife of being a human iceberg, while he is a perfect geyser of love and tenderness. And then he moans: “Oh, why did we not meet in time?” And the poor little idiot of a girl undertakes the consolation rôle.
Of course, all of this effective love play is more or less impossible to the bachelor. He lacks the technique of the married man. He cannot appeal to a woman’s sympathies, or pose before her in the rôle of a martyr. He can only make love in the commonplace old way, and it cramps his style. But the real reason that the married man is a devil among women is just the same old reason that made Eve listen to the serpent.