TAKING HER LOVE FOR GRANTED

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 4, Issue 10, 1 April 1925, Page 40

TAKING HER LOVE FOR GRANTED

A Husband.

a woman’s point of view a lazy husband is a great evil; but he is little worse than the man whose whole soul is absorbed in work. There are women who inspire men to great labour and there are others who goad them into it; but there never was a wife worth keeping who did not resent any work which usurped her rightful place in her husband’s love and attention. Even women to whose deliberate inspiration their husband’s success and achievements are due are jealous of their own creation, and for the same reason. They cannot bear to be superseded by a rival, animate or inanimate. One must confess that men are too apt to take a wife’s love for granted after marriage and to assume that she will take things for granted also. This is a frequent and a cardinal mistake. I know a man who after dinner will subside into an armchair and for hours continue absorbed in papers connected with his business. He will not recognise by look or sign the presence of his wife, a woman young, beautiful, and intellectual: if the truth be told, much younger and much more intelligent than he. Yet she is expected to remain still, silent, and happy during the protracted periods of her . lord’s absorption in his work. He believes that marriage should not interfere with

a man’s right to physical and intellectual isolation. As a money-making machine he is successful, and no doubt will continue to be so but as a husband he is doomed. r * * * * JJUSBANDS of this kind women will love and endure for a while, and at last fly from in an impulse of self-preservation. It is true that as a husband a man may live, yet work after dinner. But at times he will drop the most interesting book or the most absorbing task and forget it in a swift and spontaneous awareness of the supreme attractions of his wife. The form of words in which he finds expression are perhaps no great matter. The man who at nine o’clock in the evening can say suddenly to his wife, “By Jove, you look wonderful to-night,” is not far from the elusive El Dorado of married bliss. I am convinced that wives have suffered far too much from the male assumption that they are physically more and intellectually less than human. In consequence, men’s married experience has yielded many shocks, surprises, and exasperations. Work is the means and not the end of life, and marriage should be a setting forth, not, as is sometimes said of —and of a sinking ship—a “settling down,” and a farewell to voyage and adventure.