BROKEN MARRIAGES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 29, 3 February 1934, Page 12

BROKEN MARRIAGES.

CAUSES OF BREACHES. A London clergyman is holding a service for happily-married couples. Anyone may come, he announced, but it is intended actually for those who have found marriage all that they desired. He holds that the great majority of marriages are happy, and that the congregation which lie hopes to assemble will prove to anyone who cares to look on that all the cynicisms about marriage are based on tli® experiences of the few.

That may be (writes~a correspondent in an English paper), but the only statement I can make about marriage is based on what 1 have observed amongst my own friends and acquaintances. Telephone Tragedy. I have seen marriages break up by a slow process of disintegration, by the gradual crumbling of everything that holds a couple together. But of the marriages that come to grief during the first 10 years, those that owe their disruption to some swift domestic incident are in the majority by far. I knew a woman who had an agreement with her husband that she should never ring up his office except in case.® of emergency. It was her stipulation as much as liis—she didn't approve of women who kept pestering their husbands during business hours. Then one day she had a wire saying her mother was ill. She rang up her husband to tell him that she thought she should gc by the afternoon train, and by one ji those extraordinary coincidences she was s,witched through to a line 011 which lie was already talking. She heard his voice and then a girl's. It was an intense conversation. There was 110 mistaking its meaning. They were making a date for that evening, and instantly the wife recalled all the evenings during the past year when thii and that had kept her husband in the city. This woman just went. And she never came back. The Wrong Gifts. There was another unfortunate wife who was in a nursing home recovering from an operation. It would seem either that men are very careless or that the fates are seldom 011 the side of the erring | liusband.

By chance two gifts were mixed, and while a-girl with whom the husband had been passing some spare time received some appropriate sick-room flowers,, the sick wife received a bunch of orchids with a note saying: "Please wear these with the white tulle that is like clouds in June." It was unforgiveable to lier that, he should gallivant around while she was sick. This was their breaking point. Tragedy of Lost Beauty. One of the least understandable of the broken marriages I have knou'ri was that of .two young people whp had not been together 'more' than three' years. They were to all appearances very happy, until one night, returning from a very gay party, the man crashed into a lamp standard. The girl's face was badly cut;.-he escaped unhurt. As she lay in hospital recovering, she refused to see him or allow anyone to talk about him. When she left she went to a hotel. Every surgical treatment was tried, at the husband's request—to bring back her beauty. . But when: the sears were partially healed, she remained hard as stone, swearing that nothing would make her live with him again. So matters stand now—she living' in seclusion in the country, their - home 6old up, and he in a bachelor flat. . Two other instances of which I have recently heard were of marriages that failed for mole usual reasons. One ended because of the intolerably strained atmosphere that pervaded the home after the wife's discovery of her husband opening and reading her private letters. With them it ? had always been a point of honour that this should 11- t be done. She had kept her word. He hadn't. . The other union failed beri.ire the woman would insist on nieeHnrr her old riici.i friepds. Though she genuinely loved her 'husband. lie was'mad!/jealous and couldn't stand it. He:le >- t her. I think a successful marriage is the happiest thing that; can happcr. to anyone. but it. doesn't happen easily, concludes the writer. Nor do I think that a break comes easily; i( is a drastic cure which very often turns out to be worse than the 'disease. And I hope those who go to this service of thanksgiving go to it in good faith, - because i.bey havo more to be tharklul for than they may realise.