LVIII
MARRIAGE LESSONS
What has marriage taught you?
“The chief thing that marriage has taught me,” said a man who has had forty years of experience in matrimony, “is that women are human beings. When a man acquires that piece of information it always gives him a bit of a jolt, for most men never really think of women as human beings at all. They think, according to their kind, of women as angels, above all earthly passions, with no nerves or tempers, or selfish cravings for pleasure and who find their joy in life in loving the unlovable and forgiving the unforgivable and being a sweet, gooey, sticky mass of gentleness and patience and unselfishness. Or they think of women as being baby dolls to be dressed up and played with and put on the shelf when they are tired of them. Or they think of women as pieces of household machinery—sort of automatic, self-starting cooks and carpet sweepers and washers and menders, who run on their own power and who don’t even have to be oiled up with a few lubricating words of praise now and then.
“And so husbands treat their wives according to their conception of what women are, and that is why marriage is so often a failure and why there are so many divorces. Women don’t want to be regarded either as saints or toys or domestic conveniences. They want to be treated as human beings and have their husbands give them the same sort of a square deal a man gives his business partner.
“About nine-tenths of the spats that married people have are over money. It gets on the husband’s nerves to have the woman eternally dunning him for money. It seems to him that before he gets his hat off in the evening she begins asking for a few dollars for this and for that. Then the bills come in, and they are always bigger than he expected, and he rows about it, and she thinks that he is stingy.
“The trouble is that the man isn’t treating his wife like a rational human being. He is expecting her to be a miracle worker and run a house on air. He is humiliating her and making her feel that he is a tyrant by making her come like a beggar to him for every penny because he has got an idea that women don’t mind panhandling. Furthermore, he is expecting her to gauge her expenditures wisely, when she hasn’t the faintest idea of what her resources are.
“I have found out that it saves friction over money to make my wife as liberal an allowance as I can. I have found out that if you will explain to a woman just exactly how the financial situation stands in the family and why you can’t afford the thing she wants she will not only do without it gladly but cut down her expenses in other ways and help you to save. It is believing that their husbands are holding out on them and not splitting fifty-fifty with them that makes women reckless spenders.
“And I have found that a man is a fool who lies to his wife. In the end she always catches up with him, and then she imagines things ten times worse than they were. If a man telephones his wife that he is going to stay downtown and meet a customer from Oshkosh and she learns that he really played poker with the boys she pictures a scene of wild debauchery and leaps to the conclusion that he is leading the double life and he never hears the last of it. But if he tells her just what he is going to do she is so flattered at being trusted and thought broadminded enough not to begrudge her husband an evening’s pleasure that she goes to bed and goes to sleep instead of waiting up for him with a curtain lecture sizzling in her mind.
“Marriage has taught me that women think more of words than they do of deeds and that a woman would rather have her husband tell her that he loves her than to have him work his fingers to the bone for her and never make her a soft speech. As long as a husband tells his wife how beautiful she is and how he would like to deck her out in diamonds and sables she is perfectly content to do without them and wear hand-me-downs. It is only when she thinks that he doesn’t care whether she has fine clothes or not that she gets peevish over not having the finery that other women have.
“Marriage has taught me that in the family circle the hammer is a boomerang that returns and annihilates the hammerer. If you knock your wife’s cooking she says, ‘What’s the use of trying to please you?’ and makes no effort to improve; but if you praise her dinners she breaks her neck trying to make them better and better. If you criticize the size of the bills she revenges herself by buying something that really cost money; but if you tell her what a help she is to you and what a marvelous manager, she becomes a nickel-nurser.
“If you find fault with her hat or her dress, you have to buy her a new one; but if you tell her how becoming her last year’s costume is and how it brings out her lines, she will wear it into shreds. Marriage has taught me that if you let your wife know that you admire her and appreciate her, that you are grateful to her for all that she does for you and that you try to do all in your power to make her happy, she will repay you a thousandfold and there is nothing she won’t do for you and no fault she won’t overlook in you.”