FOR A DAY’S HOLIDAY?

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22630, 23 July 1935, Page 16

FOR A DAY’S HOLIDAY?

There’s no demand these days for the earnest, painstaking, self-sacrificing, unpaid servant kind of wife—she went out with the crinoline 1 A man would 40 times rather be greeted with a gay laugh and a not very perfect supper when he comes home in the evening than by an anxious, worried, hot wife who has been working over the gas cooker or the kitchen range for hours on end, preparing a beautifully-cooked meal for him. Ask any husband! For years we have walked the world firmly, believing the myth that men want above and beyond everything else —domestic well-being. But we are deplorably out-of-date. Really we are! They don’t. Not if it does them out of other things—other happy things. / , Naturally, any man wants his socks nicely darned, [good meals, and a comfortable room to sit down in—but after those simple wants have been satisfied his interest in the domestic side of life fades out. He doesn't care a tinker’s cuss if the curtains have lost their first youth. He doesn’t even realise they’re faded until they are thoughtfully pointed out to him by your obliging self. i Don’t run on with the quite wrong idea that I’m putting up a plea for a more or less slovenly house —I’m not. It worries me dreadfully if my own house isn’t spick and span. But I’m only saying what is definitely everlastingly true — that the average man doea not care at all deply for these things. It’a we women who care—it’s we who insist in lavishing all this domestic stuff over them. They don’t want it —ask them! Then, after giving them what they don’t want —we have the nerve to wander over the earth like injured angels talking loudly about the injustice and insensibility of men! It’s frightfully old-fashioned of us not to realise that the slogan “Feed the brute and he’s yours! ” holds good no longer. I don’t really believe “ holding ” a man was ever as childishly easy as feeding him. What a man wants most in life is a good companion. Someone to laugh with, as well as eat with; someone to play with, as well as worry with; someone to make love to; someone who'isn’t too weary and worn to be interested in his doings. To be ready at a few moments’ notice to pack up and go off on some happy jaunt. And in exchange for this gift from the gods he’ll gaily put up with a few domestic imperfections. Don’t be hard on him because he s made like that! Instead, be quick enough to see how