A DECADE’S DIFFERENCE

Taranaki Daily News, 11 February 1928, Page 20

A DECADE’S DIFFERENCE

IDEAL MARRIAGE AGES. (By Evelyn Vivian). In marriage, as in everything else, ft is the exception that proves the rule. Very few and far between are those exceptional cases where a very young wife married to an elderly husband, or vice versa, attains to permanent conjugal content. A too pronounced disparity of age is asking for disaster. Tho same holds good, with distressing frequency, in the case of too closely contemporaneous marriages. The other day a group of us were discussing the eternal theme; what constitutes the ideal difference in ages between tho masculine and feminine partners to the life-contract? Opinions varied, but the general verdict was for a difference of two or three years; five at the utmost,

I disagree. My own theory is that a decade’s difference most often spells mutual happiness. Those ten years, on

the right side for the wife, hold just -’ the right potentialities. It is a dif- j Terence long enough to keep the short- s skirt-hunting masculine complex at bay s when the liegelord grrives at the “dan- t gerous age;” and brief enough to bring a tho ten-years-youngcr wife into line, so to speak, with her husband’s outlook. A woman of twenty-five and a s man of thirty-five, in other words, are 1 c matched in age if they are matched ; temperamentally. The woman of thirty- , five, on tho other hand, marrying a man ( who has attained to this same span ( of years, will be quite ten years older ( than her husband when they reach, ( simultaneously, their forty-fifth mile- j stone. Yes! Beauty parlours and all j the rest of it notwithstanding. Real life upholds the rule at every turn. You can smooth out wrinkles from a feminine face, but not from a feminine heart. And all the brave camou- ' flage, all the gallant middle-aged feminine panache, no matter how it may de- 1 ceive others does not deceive woman 1 herself. She cannot escape the secret, ever-impinging knowledge of her own

real age, no matter what the mirror may superficially reveal. Nor the consciousness of real Youth’s rivalry. That decade’s difference has made so many decently successful inaiTiages. Cupid smiles at twenty-and-thirty; but over a thirty-and-thirty compact his bland little brow is apt to pinkie up into an anxious frown. He is looking ten years ahead.