SWEETS OF MARRIED LIFE.
Marriage, which most girls consider the sole aim of their existence and the end of all their anxieties, is often the beginning of a set of troubles which none among them expect, and which, when they come, very few accept with the dignity of patience or the reasonableness of common sense. Hitherto the man has been the suitor, the wooer. It has been his métier to make love; to utter extravagant professions; to talk poetry and romance of an eminently unwearable kind; and to swear that feelings, which by the very nature of things it is impossible to maintain at their present state of fever heat, will be as lasting as life itself and never know subsidence nor diminution. And girls believe all that their lovers tell them. They believe in the absorption of the man's whole life in the love which at the most cannot be more than a part of his life; they believe that things will go on for ever as they have begun, and that the fire and fervour of passion will never cool down to the more manageable warmth of friendship. And in this belief of theirs lies the rock on which not a few make such pitiful shipwreck of their married happiness. They expect their husbands to remain always lovers. Not lovers only in the best sense, which of course all happy husbands are to the end of time, but lovers as in the old fond, foolish, courting days. They expect a continuance of the romance, the poetry, the exaggeration, the petits soins, the microscopic attentions, the absorption of thought and interest, the centralization of his happiness in her society, just as in the days when she was still to be won, or, a little later, when, being won, she was new in the wearing. And as we said before, a wife's first trial, and her greatest, is when her husband begins to leave off this kind of fervid love-making and settles down into the tranquil friend.
As with children so is it in the nature of most women to require continual assurances. Very few believe in a love which is not frequently expressed; while the ability to trust in the vital warmth of an affection that has lost its early feverishness is the mark of a higher wisdom than most of them possess. To make them thoroughly happy a man must be always at their feet; and they are jealous of everything—even of his work—that takes him away from them, or gives him occasion for thought and interest outside themselves. They are rarely able to rise to the height of married friendship; and if they belong to a reticent and quiet-going man—a man who says 'I love you' once for all, and then contents himself with living a life of loyalty and kindness and not talking about it—they fret at what they call his coldness, and feel themselves shorn of half their glory and more than half their dues. They refuse to believe in that which is not daily repeated. They want the incense of flattery, the excitement of love-making; and if these desires are not ministered to by their husbands, the danger is that they will get some one else to 'understand' them and feed the sentimentality which dies of inanition in the quiet serenity of home. Moonlights; a bouquet of the earliest flowers carefully arranged and tenderly presented; the changing lights on the mountain tops; the exquisite song of the nightingale at two o'clock in the morning; all the rest of those vague and suggestive delights which once made the meeting-places of souls, and furnished occasion for delicious ravings, become by time and use and the wearing realities of business and the crowding pressure of anxieties, puerile and annoying to the ordinary Englishman, who is not a poet by nature. When all the world was young by reason of his own youth, and the fever of the love-making time was on him, he was quite as romantic as his wife. But now he is sobering down; life is fast becoming a very prosaic thing to him; work is taking the place of pleasure, ambition of romance; he pooh-poohs her fond remembrances of bygone follies, and prefers his pipe in the warm library to a station by the open window, watching the sunset because it looks as it did on that evening, and shivering with incipient catarrh. All this is very dreadful to her; women, unfortunately for themselves, remaining young and keeping hold much longer than do men.
The first defection of this kind is a pang the young wife never forgets. But she has many more and yet more bitter ones, when the defection takes a personal shape, and some pretty little attention is carelessly received without its due reward of loving thanks. Perhaps some usual form of caress is omitted in the hurry of the morning's work; or some gloomy anticipation of professional trouble makes him oblivious of her presence; or, fretted by her importunate attentions, he buries himself in a book, more to escape being spoken to than for the book's own merits.
Many a woman has gone into her own room and had a 'good cry' because her husband called her by her baptismal name, and not by some absurd nickname invented in the days of their folly; or because, pressed for time, he hurried out of the house without going through the established formula of leave-taking. The lover has merged in the husband; security has taken the place of wooing; and the woman does not take kindly to the transformation. Sometimes she plays a dangerous game, and tries what flirting with other men will do. If her scheme does not answer, and her husband is not made jealous, she is revolted, and holds herself that hardly-used being, a neglected wife. She cannot accept as a compliment the quiet trust which certain cool-headed men of a loyal kind place in their wives; and her husband's tolerance of her flirting manner—which he takes to be manner only, with no evil in it, and with which, though he may not especially like it, he does not interfere—seems to her indifference rather than tolerance. Yet the confidence implied in this forbearance is in point of fact a compliment worth all the pretty nothings ever invented; though this hearty faith is just the thing which annoys her, and which she stigmatizes as neglect. If she were to go far enough she would find out her mistake. But by that time she would have gone too far to profit by her experience.
Nothing is more annoying than that display of affection which some husbands and wives show to each other in society. That familiarity of touch, those half-concealed caresses, those absurd names, that prodigality of endearing epithets, that devoted attention which they flaunt in the face of the public as a kind of challenge to the world at large to come and admire their happiness, is always noticed and laughed at; and sometimes more than laughed at. Yet to some women this parade of love is the very essence of married happiness and part of their dearest privileges. They believe themselves admired and envied when they are ridiculed and scoffed at; and they think their husbands are models for other men to copy when they are taken as examples for all to avoid.
Men who have any real manliness however, do not give in to this kind of thing; though there are some, as effeminate and gushing as women themselves, who like this sloppy effusiveness of love and carry it on into quite old age, fondling the ancient grandmother with grey hair as lavishly as they had fondled the youthful bride, and seeing no want of harmony in calling a withered old dame of sixty and upwards by the pet names by which they had called her when she was a slip of a girl of eighteen. The continuance of love from youth to old age is very lovely, very cheering; but even 'John Anderson my Jo' would lose its pathos if Mrs. Anderson had ignored the difference between the raven locks and the snowy brow.
All that excess of flattering and petting of which women are so fond becomes a bore to a man if required as part of the daily habit of life. Out in the world as he is, harassed by anxieties of which she knows nothing, home is emphatically his place of rest—where his wife is his friend who knows his mind; where he may be himself without the fear of offending, and relax the strain that must be kept up out of doors; where he may feel himself safe, understood, at ease. And some women, and these by no means the coldest nor the least loving, are wise enough to understand this need of rest in the man's harder life, and, accepting the quiet of security as part of the conditions of marriage, content themselves with the undemonstrative love into which the fever of passion has subsided. Others fret over it, and make themselves and their husbands wretched because they cannot believe in that which is not for ever paraded before their eyes.
Yet what kind of home is it for the man when he has to walk as if on egg-shells, every moment afraid of wounding the susceptibilities of a woman who will take nothing on trust, and who has to be continually assured that he still loves her, before she will believe that to-day is as yesterday? Of one thing she may be certain; no wife who understands what is the best kind of marriage demands these continual attentions, which, voluntary offerings of the lover, become enforced tribute from the husband. She knows that as a wife, whom it is not necessary to court nor flatter, she has a nobler place than that which is expressed by the attentions paid to a mistress.
Wifehood, like all assured conditions, does not need to be buttressed up; but a less certain position must be supported from the outside, and an insecure self-respect, an uncertain holding, must be perpetually strengthened and reassured. Women who cannot live happily without being made love to are more like mistresses than wives, and come but badly off in the great struggles of life and the cruel handling of time. Placing all their happiness in things which cannot continue, they let slip that which lies in their hands; and in their desire to retain the romantic position of lovers lose the sweet security of wives. Perhaps, if they had higher aims in life than those with which they make shift to satisfy themselves, they would not let themselves sink to the level of this folly, and would understand better than they do now the worth of realities as contrasted with appearances. And yet we cannot but pity the poor, weak, craving souls who long so pitifully for the freshness of the morning to continue far into the day and evening—who cling so tenaciously to the fleeting romance of youth. They are taken by the glitter of things—love-making among the rest; and the man who is showiest in his affection, who can express it with most colour, and paint it, so to speak, with the minutest touches, is the man whose love seems to them the most trustworthy and the most intense. They make the mistake of confounding this show with the substance, of trusting to pictorial expression rather than to solid facts. And they make that other mistake of cloying their husbands with half-childish caresses which were all very well in the early days, but which become tiresome as time goes on and the gravity of life deepens. And then, when the man either quietly keeps them off or more brusquely repels them, they are hurt and miserable, and think the whole happiness of their lives is dead, and all that makes marriage beautiful at an end.