MARRIAGE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXV, Issue 3278, 12 March 1931, Page 2

MARRIAGE

A LITTLE DISAPPOINTING. If you are going to enter married life expecting the Fates to shower blessings upon you, if you feel that there will never be any hitch in your happiness, then I am afraid you will find marriage vastly disappointing, for life is full of bugbears, to contentment and romance, and you’ve got to keep fighting those bugbears. The one great thing, therefore, that a man and woman must take into marriage in order to make it a success is character. I suppose all couples, at some time or other during their engagement, say: “We’ll make more of a success of our marriage than other people seem to do.’’ I know we said it! '

We were so certain that we’d laugh over misfortune and make the best of the bad jobs. We’d have a sense of humour, we said. But we found that it wasn’t so easy as it sounded, even though we loved one another. You see, when you’re tired and Adam or Bill (or whatever his name is) comes home also tired, when things have gone wretchedly wrong for both of you, then it is so much easier to snap at each other than to laugh. It’s strange, my dear, how much easier it is to be a pessimist than an optimist when you’re tired.

And no marriage can help but be disappointing unless there is understanding to help you through, understanding and sympathy on one side no less than the other. That sympathy and understanding which alleviates tiredness and bad temper, that forgets its own tiredness and bad temper in loving tenderness for the other, and says: “Come along, out with it; you’ll feel better afterwards. Come and sit here and you can talk and I’ll understand.” This brings me to another point in the making of a successful marriage, and that is mutual unselfishness. That ungrudging giving with both hands, not always, mind, from one of you, but from you both. Only in the very young is jealousy understandable, for their love is coloured largely romance, and jealousy is supposed to be romantic. It may be, but it is certainly not beautiful, and goes a very long way towards making marriage disappointing. Love gives one insight; it makes one deeper in character and broader in outlook; it makes one smile at the little romantic dreams in which one wrapped love, and realise how much bigger and lovelier than any ro-

mance is marriage that has under- , standing to glorify it. Marriage a little disappointing? Like everything, it depends upon the value of what you put into it.—-Home Chat.