Sometimes a girl falls so wildly in love with a man that she creates a kind of corresponding, though passing, fervour in him, and while it lasts he believes himself in love, though his emotions are only a mixture of gratified vanity and that physical attraction which needs true love to redeem it from the fleshly sort.
When a girl takes the initiative.
Should marriage follow upon such courtships as these, where the girl takes ever the initiative, the union is very seldom a happy one. The wife never feels sure that her husband really loves her or would have chosen her. She knows that he was her choice, rather than she his, and a racking jealousy seizes her and makes her not only miserable herself, but a very uncomfortable companion for him.
The unhappy sequel.
He, too, often finds when it is too late that she fulfils none of his ideals, and is in many ways a contrast to the girl he would have chosen if she had not whirled him into the vortex of her own strong feeling. And he occasionally wonders if she may not some day experience a similar strength of attraction for some other man and let herself be carried away by it as she had been by her feeling for him. “Hot fires soon burn out,” he thinks, and remembers the warning given to Othello: “She hath deceived her father, and may thee.”
Long engagements.
No man should drag a girl into a long engagement. Nor should any man propose to a girl until he is in a position to provide for her.
And unsuitable positions.
He is only standing in the way of other wooers who may be well supplied with this world’s gear. Such trifles as wealth and ease may appear as nought to the mind of the youthful lover, not to be weighed for a moment in the balance with love and young romance. The girl, too, may be of the same way of thinking at the time, but it the more behoves the man, the stronger, to consider her and to remember that poverty is such a bitter and a cruel thing that it even kills love at times.
A man’s duty to look at cold facts.