Don’t spend money for rum while your wife has to make over her old dresses.
If your wife is worthy of it (most wives are), praise her. Women like praise.
Women are not as strongly built as men, and are thus likely to be often in delicate health. If so, your wife may be petulant and cross. Make allowances for this and don’t scold her.
Don’t interfere with your wife in the performance of the duties that belong peculiarly to her.
Give her money enough to dress well, even if you have to make sacrifices to do so.
Treat her mother with becoming respect.
Marrying for a Home.
A good many women are foolish enough and dishonorable enough to marry merely for a home—foolish because they cannot expect such a marriage to result happily, and dishonorable because they have deceived the man they married. Love ought to be the basis of all marriages.
Joy and Pleasure.
A married life is not one of unalloyed bliss. We ought not to expect this. It has its pains as well as its pleasures. As Margaret Fuller says: “Deceive not thyself by over-expecting happiness in the marriage state; look not therein for contentment greater than God will give, or a creature in this world can receive, namely, to be free from all inconveniences. Marriage is not, like the hill of Olympus, wholly clear without clouds.” When misfortune comes to us, and all the rest of the world deserts us, we have those at home to whom to look in certain expectancy of sympathy and encouragement—wife and children. As John Taylor says: “A married man falling into misfortune is more apt to retrieve his situation in the world than a single one, chiefly because his spirits are soothed and retrieved by domestic endearments, and his self-respect kept alive by finding that, although all abroad be darkness and humiliation, yet there is a little world of love at home over which he is monarch.”