Women, Children, Love, and Marriage

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

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.