The paths alike of progress and of happiness lie, obviously, in the ever further dignifying and enhancement of the functions of home and of wifehood, by way of every further interest and charm that higher, fairer Womanhood confers.
The chief cause of latter-day conjugal unrest and disaffection is to be found—not in the natural state of marriage, but in a decline of those personal traits which make for happiness therein. Girls brought up as now, without home-interests or training, but, on the contrary, with mainly self-realising and self-absorbing aims and pursuits, are deficient not only in domestic aptitudes but lamentably also in emotional qualities. And the home-life without the emotions to give values to it, is like a fine air played on the keyboard of a piano from which have been removed the strings that transform the movements of the fingers into melody.
So keenly self-centred the majority of women have become, so bent upon their hobbies and careers, as to have lost nearly all of that sympathetic adaptiveness natural to woman, which enables her to forget—and to forget with pleasure—her own in the personality and interests of others.
How eagerly latter-day girls seek refuge from their boredom in the tennis-court, the Bridge-table, the dance, or in some other mode of direct action which entails but little temperamental tax or output!
To such degree the sexes are now drilled to the same standards, interests, and points-of-view, that neither brings to the other any new thing, of freshness, of colour, or of inspiration. The interchange is only too often a competitive struggle, indeed, as to which shall know (or shall appear to know) more than the other knows (or appears to know) of topics equally trite to both. There is little or nothing of the zest and glamour of a delightful picnic of two; whereat each keeps producing some new and unexpected thing to supplement the new and unexpected of the other. Modern woman has no novelty in language even for her mate, but deals him back his own slang—a vernacular which among women of the working-classes not seldom takes the forms of blasphemy and obscenity, wholly disqualifying for the rearing of children. As, indeed, do the coarse and vulgar phrases in vogue now among the cultured of the sex. In view of woman's native faculty of music and her subtle aptitude for naming (as for nick-naming), one cannot doubt that she it was who mothered Language. Yet now-a-days, adopting virile lingo, her "rotten," "stick-it," and the like are murdering the infant of her quondam genius. And what genius it was, that gave birth to our surpassing mother-tongue!
In case of engagement between a young man and his bored one—whom, by the way, although he may suspect that the relation is not all that it might be, he never suspects of being bored—manlike, he trusts to marriage "to put everything right." Yet although the newly-wedded more and more relieve themselves of the strain of a honeymoon, with its unmitigated (or inimitable) company of two, a month or six weeks of wedlock find most young modern couples wofully at cross-purposes. Possession has freed the man of the obligation to woo. And when the wooing—which had engendered for the woman a flattering and intoxicating sense of being a coveted prize—comes to a more or less abrupt ending, she feels herself defrauded.
He too! Because while Courtship is man's affair, Marriage is woman's. And where love is not, to recruit and quicken passion and to take the place of novelty, the wane of honeymoons is sad indeed.
(There are faults and failings on the bridegroom's part, 'tis true. That belongs to another story, however. Sufficient for these pages is the unpleasing task of holding a mirror to the faults of a single sex.)
It should be remembered that men, for the most part, are not eager to marry. Considering the nature of the bond, with its lifelong obligations, responsibilities and sacrifices, this is little to be wondered at. A week after marriage a wife may be crippled by an accident, may become insane; or may otherwise be thrown, more or less a burden, on her husband's hands. Or she may develop disagreeable and wholly uncongenial traits. In spite of which, even though they wreck his happiness, he will have bound himself to her—and will have bound himself to maintain her—till death them parts.
He too, of course, may turn out wholly unsatisfactory. That belongs likewise to the other story. But from the material standpoint, the onus of support which falls on him, and which, in the case of an invalided or of an obnoxious wife, may prove nothing but a carking care, makes the liabilities unequal.