LET HIM KEEP HIS FRIENDS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 636, 12 April 1929, Page 5

LET HIM KEEP HIS FRIENDS

A WORD TO YOUNG WIVES By EVELYN VIVIAN II you want your own little domestic romance to last don’t pour cold water on your liusband’s pre-marriage friendships. Don’t forget he lived some sort of life of his own before you entered it; a life that contained human beings other than yourself, to whom he was loyally attached. Don’t strain his loyalty to the new tie by trying to break those older links.

Often young wives fail to realise how fiei’cely possessive are their jealous instincts, and how jealously can distort the words and actions of quite nice people who happen to have drifted into a husbandd’s ken before he slipped a plain gold ring on one particular feminine Anger. There is a certain type of little Mrs. Newly Wed—not at all uncommon even in these modern days—who simply cannot bear the idea that she is not an all-sutncient companion. She would love to think that the present completely obliterated the past. She forgets that the man she fell in love with was in part the product of all those past influences in which she had no share. Could he have been her beau ideal if, as her wifely jealousy contends, the men and women of his former acquaintance were such unlikeable creatures? Of course he couldn’t! And the young wife who parades dislike of those pre-marriage friends is most unattractively parading her own most ! unlikeable qualities. Not by such methods will she tighten the matri- | monial link. And it will not be altogether a question of loyalty to old i friends that will deepen her husband's resentment of her attitude. No man can stand being dictated to in such ! matters, even by the most charming little hearthstone companion. Because your veal “lie-man” loathes any form of petticoat government and control. Petticoat government, domestically speaking, can be achieved only by the inflnitely experienced and with the ut- | most subtlety. It is an accomplishi ment that demands strategic powers and self-control beyond the compass of the frankly jealous young wife, who has not yet learned the painful but salutary process of quashing primeval emotions and bidding her philosophic time.

Very naturally a husband considers' himself the best judge of his own friendships. And even if, occasionally, they are proof of masculine lack of insight or vision, it is a very foolish wife who tells him so. There are better ways of bringing him round ultimately to her viewpoint than by making a direct attack on his inferiority complex.