How to Get Married, Although a Woman; or, The Art of Pleasing Men

by Irene W. Hartt

A girl rarely considers the deep responsibilities she takes upon herself when she marries. She is more often thinking of the happiness it will give her than of what she is to be to the man. She does not stop to think whether or not she is going to make her husband happy. She forgets that from that time his whole happiness, his success in life, almost his soul, are in her keeping. “A man must ask his wife’s leave to thrive” is altogether true. A wife may be a dead weight or an inspiration. The dead weight drags even the strongest down, and an inspiration helps him to conquer every time. I have heard a man with a bad wife say: “Oh, I have no heart in me to do anything. She takes it all out of me.” I have known a man with less ability, but with a true wife to inspire him, to conquer where the other failed.

Marriage itself is not happiness unalloyed. Life never is in any state. You are happier married than single, but marriage has its hard places. The romance soon dies out. Real life comes. The every day living together brings friction. It is for better and for worse. It seems a light thing to say at the time when you are sure it will all be for the better. You fancy you have only half learned his goodness. In many cases that is so. In many more it is not: it is for the worse. Then the break comes. Gradually his weaknesses will be revealed to you. The golden idol shows clay feet. Slowly the gilding is all rubbed off, and the idol is seen to be clay all through. Many a woman meets with this disappointment. It is the great disappointment of her life. God help the woman who finds that her husband is unworthy of her love! A weak woman sinks under the blow, and drags him even farther down. A strong woman will stand up bravely and in the end draw him up to her heights.

She must gather together all her love for him. She must allow religion to take the helm with this love or all is lost. Sometimes love reels: sometimes the senses do. Then, of all times, a woman must watch herself well. She is fighting a terrible battle with her disappointment as well as with his faults. They must be silent battles: the more silent the stronger they will be, and the more sure she will be of victory. She must never by hint or word let any one outside know of his failings. If they are of the kind which go before or which are well known by the community, she must show the world that she is blind to them. She must never speak against her husband even to her own mother. She must never admit that he has a fault. She has entered into a partnership where one partner cannot be untrue to the other. She has promised before God to honor him. Her loyalty may save him. It is certain that if she does talk about him, and it comes to his ears, it will drive him away from her. When a breach is made between husband and wife, it widens continually. What in the beginning is a tiny thread soon becomes a broad gulf. It is really wonderful what a little while it takes for this breach to widen, and how disastrous are the effects. Our daily papers are a continual illustration of that fact.

A perfect wife will never allow her opinion of her unworthy husband to be known. If he is unkind to her, she hides it as she hides her own misdeeds. Indeed, she would rather take upon herself the blame for any trouble others may have seen. She is pleased always with any kind attention he receives. A lady wrote her sister, with whom her husband was stopping for a few days: “He writes me you are doing every thing to make his visit pleasant. Thank you. Whatever kindness you bestow upon him you bestow upon me.”

You will find plenty of listeners when you tell of your husband’s faults and your own wrongs. They will be your apparent sympathizers. Not one, however, will respect you for doing so. No one will care about you. Almost all will repeat it to some one else. It will be generally said that you live unhappily with your husband. You will have as much blame as he has. It is the way of the world. It knows pretty well that the wife who so far forgets herself as to talk against her husband is as much to blame for the trouble as he is. She cannot be a good, loving, Christian wife, who is trying to lead him to better things. Such a woman would hold her tongue. In telling, you have simply opened all the doors and windows of your house and invited the community to look their fill at your most private affairs. The rest of the doors and windows of the community are closed. You have noticed—have you not?—that your confidence has not been returned. No, indeed. It is well known that the woman who cannot guard her husband’s honor cannot respect another’s confidence. If only in the sight of men then, the untrue wife is the loser. She sends him into greater wrong. She undoes herself as she undoes him. Together they must rise or fall. Many a woman in her blind anger at her husband has tried to crush him. Like Samson, when he would crush the Philistines, she has succeeded, but only to bury herself in the ruins with him.

That her husband is not what she thought him, is no excuse: she took him for worse as well as better. She is simply showing that she is not one whit above him, and that he has been decidedly deceived in her. He has gotten the worse too.

Unfortunately true, good men have bad wives, too—they are not confined to bad husbands only. There are wives of good men who forget that the husband’s whole happiness depends upon them. Many a wife forgets this great responsibility. His business may be successful and everything outside going along satisfactorily, but if he has no peace at home he has no happiness. A woman who does not make her husband happy fails in her great life-work. She is unworthy to be the mother of his children. God gave woman to man to be his helpmeet; she is no helpmeet if she makes his life wretched. It is her highest pleasure, her great “rights,” to smooth his path. If she fail there, she far better never have married.

What a man wants in his wife is companionship, sympathy, and love. He wants to feel that she is his best friend. He never wants to look anywhere else for sympathy and help: he never will if he can get all he needs from her. His life has many hard places: he needs a companion to go over them with him. He is often overtaken by misfortunes: he needs some one to stand by him and sympathize as she helps him to bear them. He has to fight with poverty often, and he needs a woman whom he feels, when he puts his arms about her, is worth fighting for. He has many enemies: he needs a wife whose loving words will make up for the bitter ones he hears from them. He needs a wife who will make him forget, when he is in her presence, that there is an unkind world outside. He meets sin everywhere: he wants a wife who will give him words of counsel, and who will take his hands and lead him to greater faith in, and love for, the Father. Storms will come all through life, he must encounter them. He needs a woman who will cling to him through the hardest. He needs her love through sunshine and victory as well.

He wants to feel through all that his refuge is in her arms as hers is in his. He wants a wife upon whose breast he can lay his head, when sorrows come, and weep. He wants one who will make him feel that no matter where else death strikes, as long as he has her he can endure life. I remember a man who, when his dearly-beloved sister died, laid his head on his wife’s shoulder, weeping, and said, “If it were you I should die.”

There are in history women upon whose strong hearts strong men have leaned and have become more strengthened in that leaning. Weak men have become manly through a womanly wife. Strong men have been weakened by a weak, wicked wife. Truly a man is made or marred when he marries. He must indeed ask his wife leave to thrive.