THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN AND HIS YOUNG WIFE
Everyone is busily trying to explain why there are so many unhappy marriages at the present time, but few people seem to realise that one of the most prolific causes has been the comparatively recent tendency of women to marry out of their class. We all know that all social distinctions were in abeyance during the war, and even afterwards. Normal class separations, conventional standards, old careful habits of conduct have been largely broken through at a time of great uncertainty and many changes.
Some of us hoped that this new co-operation which seemed to be springing up between men and women of different social classes would lead to permanent changes. We forgot that excitement is the most potent intoxicant, and that after excitement there is usually a falling back into dullness and apathy. But certainly for a time there was quite a new loosening of the guiding-rein of reason, that has allowed the horses of impulse and instinct freer than ever before to pull the car of ourselves and our fates in this direction and in that, just as they chose.
The many misfit marriages bear witness to the excited condition of women.
And it ought not to be difficult to realise, with the least gift of imagination, the conflict and the unhappiness, almost necessarily resulting, from such unions, entered into during that period of topsy-turvy conditions, between the man who had “risen” and the more complicated type of modern girl—the girl of brains and nerves, passionate, intellectually emancipated and delighting in her new-gained freedom; yet, at the same time, fastidious, ruled by traditions and inherited habits, which crop up unexpectedly, with a conservatism that is neither acknowledged nor reckoned with.
The men who in commerce or in war had a meteoric success have, in many cases, fallen back; they are but clerks, shop-assistants, artisans. They themselves, and everything belonging to them seem different. While they were accepted as gentlemen, because of what they had done or the money they had made, they married “above them” as the phrase is. And now when the money is spent and what they did no longer remembered, they cannot find work that will enable them to maintain the outward show of being a gentleman. The intoxication of excitement is over, and their wives complain, not only of their position, but of them.
The temporary gentleman and his young wife, in many cases, are finding that it needs a lot of grit and a lot of duty to keep in love. For the rose-coloured glasses of courtship have been replaced by the blue goggles of matrimony. They are already unhappy, though they expected happiness. You see, their love has been tested by the love-destroying test of poverty. And these difficult days have cast their homes into disorder.
We have all felt the world’s wave of trade depression: the world’s difficulties have dealt a blow, causing a leak to spring in many a frail boat of domestic happiness, so that its inexperienced navigators no longer can exercise control over the journey.
Now it is customary to blame the wife. Always it is the woman’s fault. She is, or ought to be, the home-maker. While no one seems to consider how much depends on the character, or conditions, of the home she is asked to make.
The boarding-school-educated and college girl has never been trained to perform or to endure the difficult, necessary duties of the poor man’s home. In their girlhood’s homes and luxurious schools, everything was done for them. That was in the old, almost-forgotten days of cheap domestic service.
In no other direction, perhaps, has there been so great and so far reaching changes as in the homes of the so-called upper classes. In a sense, to-day we have no homes, only places in which we sleep, and sometimes eat. For the domestic work of preparing the food and keeping the home as a place to live in and not to escape from has, in great measure, ended; duties which once it was every woman’s pride to do well, have been allowed to slip, as far as possible, into the hands of hired experts. In the old days cooking and housekeeping, and even house-cleaning, were known to all women. Every wife was expected to enter into competition with other wives in the important matters of making bread and cakes, and in making jams and jellies and puddings.
But the home, with its old full activities, has passed out of the hands of the mistress. So to-day a girl often finds herself forced to learn the very elements of the routine day of the wage-earner’s wife. And the duties that have to be learnt are many of them disagreeable as well as immensely tiring and monotonous to unaccustomed hands.
I do not, however, believe that the knife-and-fork aspect of these marriages is the fundamental aspect. It is love itself that is at fault. The strain and the jar of daily living under these difficult restless conditions have been too great, especially for the women.
The passing from one way of living, from one station of society to another, is always a hard and unpleasant process. We do not always know it or admit it, even if we do know, but the small, almost unnoticed differences in habits and manners are harder to tolerate than many a more fundamental cleavage.
I want to labour this point. The most frequent causes of trouble in those marriages where there is poverty and a restricted life, are born, I am certain, out of the daily fret of uncomfortable and cheap living together, out of small ugly minor habits of omissions, and stupidities.
Romantics may deny this, but what most wears and frays the love of wives are just trifles so small that very rarely is their adverse action directly noticed. But they give an escape for the concealed hostility, and set up an almost indecent and fearfully intolerant irritation. Dirty finger nails, the murdering of words, or making a noise when you eat soup, may be much harder to bear than real unkindness and anger. The failure to rise and give up a chair or to open a closed door may seem greater neglect to a wife than the absence of money to buy presents. The roughness of the “rough diamond” becomes unbearable. Things that once did not seem to matter, now matter tremendously.
Of course this is illogical, but then love is illogical.
And month by month as it passes makes the marriage more broken. The disappointment goes deeper though the irritation may, perhaps, be less frankly expressed. This is the time of the real danger. It is the wife’s own love that is failing her, much more than anything her husband may do or not do.
The difficulty of finding suitable work, the differences in friends and in the accustomed spheres of life, could be overcome were it not for the unconscious want of will to overcome them. The man may feel that he would do better farming in Canada than here. It is a very certain indication that the woman has ceased to love him wholeheartedly if she objects to accompany him on the ground that all her friends are in England.
Love does not hesitate: it delights to give up and to sacrifice.
You will see what this means: It is rather the hidden feelings that make conscious social difference, that act and are far stronger than the difference itself.
The unacknowledged failure in Love, not anything that happens outwardly, is the real trouble that gnaws at the root of content in their marriages, and rots and breaks the bond.
Yet there is a bright side to these marriages even when they fail. The socially adventurous, the breakers of conventions, must expect trouble; but they may console themselves by reflecting that they are pioneers in opposing dead traditions. Only the tall trees sway in the breeze, the dwarf plants are ingloriously safe.