WHY MEN DON'T MARRY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 14, 2 April 1892, Page 324

WHY MEN DON'T MARRY.

The nun who can marry, and who nowadays are usually thirty-three, are men of certain experience, and are by no means fools. They are attracted by good looks, whether in the foolish or the wise virgins, and are carried away by unusual beauty, as they were in the days of Helen, and will be when the world cools ; but they are quite conscious of the advantage possessed by the sensible and the cultivated. They know w hat terrible bores ignorant girls can be, how utterly unreasonable they often are in the middle life to grow acrid, snappish or positively ill tempered. There is no one so perverse as the woman without intellectual interests whose situation happens to be at variance with her ideas of comfort, or who, being comfortable is conscious of the faint contempt, or rather slight avoidance of those around her. Women are perfectly well aware when men listen from politeness alone, and those among them to whom that lot falls grow as bitter as some disappointed spinsters. The men of thirty-three know perfectly well how great a part friendship plays in married life, bow it deepens affection, and how difficult it is to feel friendship for a woman whose early charm has passed, who does not understand one word in six you say, and who can neither sympathise with failure nor understand why you have succeeded. Companionship, one of the most delightful of all the bonds of union, is impossible between the able and the silly. The men, too, are aware that it is the clever girls, not the simpletons, who are free from the senseless extravagance which is, perhaps, of all the foibles which are not exactly vices, the most permanently irritating in wives. One thing, at least, culture has done for the majority of cultured women—it has taught them how to count. The immense majority of cultivated girls are economical. Frugality is the road to iudependeuce. They could not live their lives if they cost their fathers too much, and they learn to know the value of money, and to avoid debt with horror. They are not, perhaps, devoted to ‘ housekeeping ’ as some of the unlettered are, meaning, three times out of five, endless and harassing interference with their servants ; but they can keep house, when they know their incomes, at an outlay well within them. Men know what it is to be bored. There is no bore on earth equal to the woman who can neither talk nor listen, who has no mental interests in common with her husband, and who thinks his friends satirical because they attend to her with a faint sense of amused amazement. The men we are speaking of believe also that, of the two, the educated are the more affectionate.

But girls of culture are too frank of speech, contradict men, unless much and visibly their elders, too often and too bluntly, and are therefore condemned as ‘formidable.’ This habit—for it is nothing worse—does not proceed in them, as it does in most men, from either arrogance, or temper, or want of self-control, for they do not display it towards women, even when intellectually their inferiors. It proceeds from delight in intellectual independence, from an unexpected sense of mental equality which must be made audible to be thoroughly enjoyed. You will see a son contradict his father, or a clever lad his tutor, from precisely the same motive ; but men who are on an equality rather avoid it, striving rather to differ utterly under cover of some formula of assent, and disliking the Hazlitt way—he used to contradict everybody, even the watchman when calling the hour—and they dislike it in women most particularly. Even very sensible young man of experience will retreat before it with a sense of disappointment and choler, and never again, unless by accident, give the girl who has tried, as they think, to ‘ put them down ’ a chance of showing that she was attempting nothing of the kind. The habit is a mere gesture in reality, a colt’s kick of pleasure in the free field, and not, as it often is in old women, a sign of vicious temper ; but it constantly ruins a bright girl's chances, and has done much to create in society an impression which is, on the evidence of facts, entirely unfounded. Cultivated girls have, in fact, a trick of thinking that argument is conversation, and that contradiction shows mental fearlessness—a trick which even tolerant men never quite like.