LXI
WHY DIVORCE IS COMMON
When we hear about a couple getting a divorce on the grounds of incompatibility of temper we instinctively feel that it is too trivial a reason for breaking up a home and we condemn them as poor sports who did not have enough grit to carry on and make the best of their bargain. If it had been something big, now—drunkenness, the drug habit, infidelity—if the husband had been a brute who beat his wife, or the wife a virago, we could have sympathized with them. But just to get a divorce because they didn’t think alike on politics and religion and hadn’t the same taste in pie. Pooh! Quitters. A yellow streak. We’ve no pity for them.
Yet when you come to think of it, is there really anything else in the whole wide world that comes so near to justifying divorce as incompatibility of temper? Is there any other such good reason for a man and woman parting and going their separate ways as the fact that they have not one thought or desire or interest in common? And is there any other torture comparable with having to live in intimate daily contact with a person who continually rubs your fur the wrong way, who gets on your nerves, who rasps your sensibilities and keeps you in a perpetual bad humor? It is a lot easier to forgive an occasional big fault than it is to put up with never-ending petty irritations. The big sinners at least take a day off from their vices now and then, but the little sinners who sin against our habits and ideals and conventions are always on the job. So when you think of this and consider the difficulties there are in the way of every man and woman who get married adjusting themselves to each other, you are not surprised that divorce is so common. You only wonder that it isn’t universal.
Here are two persons of different sexes, doomed by nature to look at everything from different standpoints and to react differently to every situation. Back of them is a different heredity, often a different race. In their veins flow alien currents of blood. They have been brought up with different standards, in different schools of thought. Different habits have been bred in them. They worship different gods and at different altars and eat different dishes.
What marvel that such a couple come to grief on the rocks of incompatibility of temper! The miracle of it is that any of them have the wit and wisdom to steer around it. But the terrible and pathetic thing about it is that in hundreds of these cases in which husbands and wives live a cat-and-dog life and make each other perfectly miserable, or else break their marriage vows, nobody is really to blame. Each is perfectly right from his or her standpoint, only they can’t agree. They can’t adjust themselves to each other. The woman who has been brought up in a happy-go-lucky household, where the only use any one saw for a dollar was to spend it as quickly as possible, where meals were movable feasts that were as likely to happen at one hour as another, is a thorn in the side of a husband who has been trained from his youth up to make a fetich of thrift, order and promptness.
On the other hand, the woman whose mother has brought her up to make a sacred rite of cleanliness and who scrubs the back of every kitchen shelf and regards a chair out of place or ashes on the rug as a high crime and misdemeanor, is fretted into nervous prostration by a husband who never can be taught to wipe his feet on the doormat or kept from mussing up the best sofa cushion.
There are women who die of broken hearts, frozen to death by the coldness of their husbands. They have come from warm-hearted, demonstrative families. They have been accustomed to having a fuss made over them and to seeing their father’s loverlike attentions to their mother, and they think that their husbands do not love them, because they never tell them so. They cannot understand the dumb, repressed temperament that is utterly incapable of showing what it feels. Then there is the gay, pleasure-loving man who likes to dance and dine in restaurants and jazz; the good fellow whom everybody likes and who has holes in his pockets that no wife’s economy can ever sew up. What superhuman wisdom and patience it takes in a woman to keep from nagging him if she has been brought up in an austere family that frowned on all frivolous amusements and whose watchword was duty instead of good times!
Then there is the eternal conflict over little trivial personal habits and ways, over things as small as cooking. Irvin Cobb said once that the Civil War was fought not over secession or slavery but over hot bread and cold bread. Certainly many thirty or forty-year family wars are waged over what strength the breakfast coffee shall be and the use of onions in the soup. And certainly it is no trivial matter for one accustomed to a sophisticated, highly cultured cuisine to have to insult your palate with plain, ignorant, boiled food because the partner of your bosom has had his or her early education in eating neglected. Probably no woman who has been reared in the belief that one’s good clothes should be kept for company and that any sort of old messy duds were good enough for home consumption can realize the disgust she inspires in her husband’s breast when she comes down to breakfast in a boudoir cap and a soiled kimono and no complexion if he is of the fastidious sort to whom slovenliness is a mortal sin.
These little things—the niceties of life that one has been taught to observe and the other hasn’t, the order and thrift one has been bred to and the other hasn’t, the difference in point of view, in taste, in habit—make the inevitable friction between husbands and wives which is at the bottom of almost every divorce. And when you think how hard it is to give up our old opinions and ways of doing things, the wonder is that so many persons are able to do it and that so many couples do adjust themselves to each other and get along in reasonable peace and harmony.