Trials of Married Life
We celebrate the wedding and make merry over the honeymoon. The poet paints the beauties and blushes of the blooming bride; and the bark of matrimony, with its freight of untested love, is launched on the sea of experiment, amid kind wishes and rejoicing. But on that precarious sea are many storms, and even the calm has its perils; and only when the bark has weathered these, and landed its cargo in the haven of domestic peace, can we pronounce the voyage prosperous and congratulate on their merited and enviable reward.
As long as human nature is what it is, we must expect that life of any kind will abound in trials. To conceive of a life utterly devoid of these is to conceive of a vegetative kind of existence. Trials, then, are to be expected, and they must be overcome. This is none the less true of married life. Marriages may be celebrated in bowers as fair as those of Eden, but they must be proved and put to test in the workshops of the world. And as each state of existence has its peculiar trials and cares, we need not be disappointed when experience teaches that, though marriage hath indeed great joys, it has also its trials and vexations.
In prosaic, every-day life romantic minds are speedily sobered down, and the gloss of pretension is soon worn off. Hands that have heretofore seen no harder work than to entice strains of music from ivory keys, perhaps find themselves engaged in the less poetical, but equally as praiseworthy, occupation of mixing bread, or in the performance of other plain household duties which require to be dispatched, not by angels, but by women. And the possessor of faultless clothes and a silken mustache finds himself weighed down with altogether different burdens than those of holding fans and carrying parasols; and he is called upon to solve other questions than those relating to social etiquette.
Courtship is to many a dreamy resting-place betwixt the joys of youth and the cares of maturity. Under the light of hope married life is nearly always a land of rainbows to the youth; but, as to produce the rainbow it requires the falling rain as well as the shining sun, so, when the nature of these prospective joys is carefully investigated, it will not surprise one to find that trials and duties are interposed between their present stand-point and the pure happiness of domestic life.
To many a young couple, when life's realities come, come also the discovery of traits of character in each other which perfectly astonish them. Every day reveals something new and something unpleasant. The courtship character slowly fades away, and, with sorrow be it said, too often the courtship love as well. Now comes disappointment, sorrow, regret. They find that their characters are entirely dissimilar; they also awake to the fact that married life is full of cares, vexations, and disappointments. This, indeed, should have been expected; but it is human to see naught but joys in the future, especially from the stand-point of youth. This discovery often shipwrecks the happiness of the unfortunate couple.
We have all seen the trees die in Summer-time. But the tree, with its whispering leaves and swaying limbs, its greenness, its umbrage, where the shadows lie hidden all the day, does not die all at once. First a dimness creeps over its brightness; next a leaf sickens here and there, and fades; next a whole bough feels the palsying touch of coming death; and finally the feeble signs of sickly life, visible here and there, all disappear, and the dead trunk holds out its stripped, stark limbs, a melancholy ruin. Just so does wedded love sometimes die. Wedded love, blessed with the prayers of friends, hallowed by the sanction of God, rosy with present joys, and radiant with future hopes, it dies not all at once. A hasty word casts a shadow upon it, and the shadow deepens with the sharp reply. A little thoughtlessness misconstrued, a little unintentional negligence, deemed real, a little word misinterpreted,—through such small channels do dissension and sorrow enter the family circle. Love becomes reticent, confidence is chilled, and noiselessly but surely the work of separation goes on, until the two are left as isolated as the pyramids, nothing remaining of the union but the legal form—the dead trunk of the tree, whose branches once waved in the sunlight. Is it not a melancholy reflection on human nature that petty trials and difficulties, from which no life is free, should have wrought such a startling effect?
The great secret is to learn to bear with each other's failings; not to be blind to them—that were either an impossibility or a folly. We must see and feel them; if we do neither, they are not evils to us, and there is obviously no need of forbearance. We are to throw the mantle of charity around them, concealing them from the curious gaze of others; to determine not to let them chill the affections. Surely it is not the perfections, but the imperfections, of human character that make the strongest claims on our love.