SALT OF HAPPINESS

Southland Times, Issue 22993, 12 September 1936, Page 15

SALT OF HAPPINESS

What is the salt that provides happiness in married life? Certainly it is unfailing courtesy between man and wife, states a writer in The Sydney Morning Herald. Marriage is life with the veneer rubbed off. Human beings have no idea of how many faults they possess, nor how they look to others, until they hear the litany of their shortcomings, chanted with relentless candour by their husbands or wives. The freedom to say just what one pleases to husband or wife has broken up more homes than any other cause. Courtesy is the buffer which we interpose between ourselves and the unpleasant facts of life. Nowhere else is it so needed as in matrimony. Nowhere else is it so completely dispensed with, which accounts for the number and violence of the family jars we hear on every side. Every man, when he marries, believes himself a hero in the eyes of his wife. Every woman thinks her husband has idealized her into an angel, and both of them get the jolt of their lives when they are told in plain, unvarnished English that the other party not only regards them as human beings, but as pretty poor specimens of humanity at that. The book that most needs to be written, and that will come nearer to filling a long-felt want, will be a handy manual of etiquette for husbands and wives that will teach them to be as polite to each other as they are to strangers. In all homes courtesy is the pivot on which domestic happiness turns.