The Marriage of Reason.
Swift's saying that the reason why so few marriages are happy is that "young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages," is doubly outrageous. In the first place, it is an outrageous begging of the question. The testimony of less cynical observers in our day and country is that most marriages are entitled to be called happy.
In the second place, it outrageously puts the whole blame for unhappy marriages on the female partner, contrary alike to probability and to fact. But at least as many of the marriages are failures in which men "choose" their wives, or think they do, as in cases in which men become the prey of their own imaginations.
And there is this to be said from the point of view of reason in favor of marriages with which reason has nothing to do. In the first months of married life there are necessarily very many differences to be adjusted and small incompatibilities of ways of thinking and feeling to be reconciled. That, as all experienced spouses know, is the trying period.
Marriage is like life in that it is a school wherein whoso does not learn must suffer. Now, to diminish the friction of this trying time no better lubricant could possibly be provided than the romantic love, which cannot be expected to last forever, but which may very probably outlast this greatest necessity for it of the early connubial period.
When the glamour of the romance "fades into the light of common day," and a real man and a real woman take the places of the creatures of each other's fancy, and passion cools into at best the tenderest of friendships, both parties are better off, and will acknowledge themselves to be better off because the romance has been.