THE LIGHTER SIDE OF LIFE

Ladies' Mirror, Volume I, Issue 4, 2 October 1922, Page 24

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF LIFE

by A. Mann

SOME REFLECTIONS ON MATRIMONY

(~)F course women are little interested in this subject; why should they be when for the sex marriage is an end in viewfor the baser half an end mercifully obscured? Still, there are some more or less interested, the divorce court records prove that. And they are records, too — twenty in one day in Auckland, over thirty at a sitting in Wellington; America will have to look to her laurels. Reno will find its divorce mills in the discard if it does not sit up and take notice in time. What you don’t know in marriage you find out in divorce, and perhaps it is better to open up an easy way to slip the knot—and it does look a little like a slipknot these days—than to keep together two souls who, having at first thought that love was the spice of life, have since learned that marriage is the mustard pickles of a cold lunch. But there is another angle to it. What is wanted is not the annihilation of romance by the knock-out route of the decree nisi, but a lifesaving corps to go to the rescue of the little blind god when he gets out of his depth. First, _ there should be a school for teaching people when they are well off. Strange how few realise so simple a thing as that. So many fail to note the difference between marital and martial law, and start to look for trouble when they should be hunting up a white flag. In the marriage customs of the ancients a woman was only allowed to have one husband. This was called monotony, and that is one of the little blue-devils that lead up to the door of the divorce court. But he can be kept on the door-mat by a bit of judicious manoeuvring. When a man goes philandering he is generally looking for the qualities his wife displayed when she attracted him into matrimony, but which she has found a trifle tedious after the weddingring has been slipped on. Suppose a woman continued to exercise some of the arts and artifices which were her pre-nuptial habit, wouldn’t that check the vagrant fancies of the other end of the table a little, and keep him closer home? No use angling for a hooked fish, of course, but many a fish has wriggled off the hook, or straightened it out, when a little gentle treatment would have landed him in the basket. When he begins to wriggle, might not a bit of judicious playing keep him so snugly at the end of the line that he would cease to notice the hook in his jaw, or the trace that keeps it there. Same with men. The little amenities that softened the road and the heart should not die off when he says “I wilt.” There is no call to lose the lover in the husband, and when he bumps against a domestic snag or two, all he need do is to remember that the very first wife raised Cain, and that the habits of a lifetime, or a sex, are not easy to obliterate. For most women after the engagement blisses, marriage seems . like slipping from a ten-shilling taxi into a tuppenny tram. The transfer isn’t oyer-pleasant, but wisdom accepts the nine and tenpence as a fair instalment towards a summer hat. A HUSBAND is a partner in the civil contract known as matrimony, generally the working partner, and his disillusionment is often like that of a stage-struck girl who gets her first peep behind the scenes. He may find that a woman who has been got up to kill, can’t be got up to cook; and that a woman who gets herself up to kill, can make the home deadly. Still, he married her for better or worse, and that sounds like an even money deal. He may find out

that he has to swallow more than cookery, but ten to one he will stick it out if the pace does not get too hot. Speaking by and large, the more a wife craves sympathy the more her husband deserves it. The sympathy seeker is usually of the type that a man will run after when she is married, though he would run away from her were she single. If the “by-all-I-am-misunderstood” type realised that her greatest charm is the fact that she is tied to someone else she might chafe less under the curb. When choosing husbands, girls should bear in mind that it is considered the correct thing in the best circles to choose one at a time. Bigamy is its own punishment. It also saves trouble in the long run not to choose someone else’s husband; some wives are so meticulous about these details. The observant maid will notice that when a man drops into a love affair, it generally leaves him with something to think about—lucky for him if it isn’t a wife. And when a girl tells him: “Somehow you’re different,” he can prepare to be measured for a tail-coat; for courtship consists of a man running after a girl till she has caught him. That is because a woman marries when she knows what she wants—a man when he wants something and does not realise what it is. When a young couple are in love, they walk on air; more marriages would be quite happy if they could live on as cheap a commodity. It isn’t until she has been married six months that a woman remembers the husbands she might have had. Then she recites their perfections until her husband realises that they were the only perfect men that ever lived. But a little later on she finds out that, though she hates him, despises him, or is ashamed of him, at any rate, and in spite of his defects, she is rather more than glad of him. Her bachelor friends and acquaintances may seem more interesting, but it does not do to forget that a bachelor has the better of a husband in this way: that he can render a woman happy by making her a wife, whereas a married man can only confer complete happiness on his wife by making her a widow. The bachelor has another pull, too, for the married man’s loneliness is of a different quality to his; the married man has not so many places to go to. But no bachelor really appreciates the advantages of single life, till he is married. The ancients knew what they were about when they depicted love as a child—too young to marry.