--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Jordan, William George collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 14 number: 9 published: 1911-07 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: 'William George Jordan, "Little Problems of Married Life—I," *Improvement Era* 14, no. 9 (July 1911): 787–793.' source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera1409unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera1409unse start_page: 787 end_page: 793 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1911-07) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera1409unse publication_year: 1911 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1911, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # Little Problems of Married Life—I Little Problems of Married Life.* BY WILLIAM GEOftGE JORDAN. I.—The Springtime of Married Life. The air is balmy and glowing and inspiring in the spring-time of married life. There is the joy of a new beginning when two face a new world together, like Adam and Eve in that Eden of old. Life seems pulsing with infinite possibilities, and new habits, determining a harvest of good or ill for both, put forth their first tender buds of promise and prophecy. Dual living means the harmonizing of two lives in unity. It requires conscious, consecrated effort towards attainment. In this period of becoming used to each other, of learning, experiment, compromise, and adjustment, mistakes are inevitable. This spring-time should be taken seriously—but not too seriously. Little inharmomes are dangerous not in themselves but in the bitter memories and misunderstandings they may leave in their trails. Those married people who tell you, ten or fifteen years after the wedding, that there never has been one cross word spoken between them, never a moment of even irritation, never a single shadowing cloud of disagreement, belong to one of three classes: They have been mercifully endowed with a talent for forgetting, they handle truth with a certain shyness, or one of them is the overawed victim of the other's personality. Have you ever heard an old sea-captain boast that in all his experience he had never seen a squally sea, never a dull, heavy, storm-laden sky, never heard the tempest shriek through the Copyright, 1910, by Fleming H. Revell Company. 788 IMPROVEMENT ERA. rigging, and threaten to tear away the masts? His pride is in his skill, not in his luck. The matrimonial sea never remains absolutely serene and calm, with no ruffling waves, for years at a time. The vital point is that the storms have all been weathered in safety and the love and trust, purified by time, remain" undaunted. In the days of courtship two may feel that they thoroughly understand each other, and that no matter how many marriages may fail their happiness together is absolutely assured. Yet courtship is only the kindergarten class of matrimony. Courtship is the preliminary canter, not the real race. It is the matrimonial shopping; marriage is the acceptance of the unreturnable delivered goods. Courtship is the joyous, sunshine launching of the craft of hope; marriage is the long cruise across uncharted seas. The two now pass under the test of new conditions; they face new problems and enter a life of finer attunement,of constant call on patience, tolerance, forbearance, concession, kindness, sympathy and wise understanding. Happiness in married life means the happiness of two, made by two; neither can do all. No individual can sing a duet. They should be glad to bear anything and everything that fate may bring them for each other, but not from each other. With union towards opposing conditions and unity between themselves they can command happiness. Their attitude is of supreme importance; everything else is secondary. It is not what comes to them but the spirit in which they meet it that really counts. In love, loyalty, comradeship and mutual dependence, even trial, sorrow, sickness and poverty may bring them only nearer and dearer, soul-serene and heart-glad that they still have each other. This condition never comes through drifting, by letting things take their course, by just hoping that somehow it will turn out all right. Merely wishing it and wanting it will neither create nor keep this harmony; they must will to make it, determine, by living individually at their best, to unite in the finest unity. The responsibility rests on both; the failure may be due to either. There will come a time in this spring-tide when they awaken to the consciousness of unpleasant traits in each other. The wife may find that what she deemed his fine firmness of character is simply unadultered obstinacy. His reverence for money in small LITTLE PROBLEMS OF MARRIED LIFE. 789 denominations is not the prudence and wise economy she once believed, but a chronic tender-heartedness that makes it hard for him to say good-bye to a dollar. In the old days she was the gentle referee of all his thinking; now he seems as autocratic and domineering as a slave-driver in the Congo. He, too, may suddenly find himself conscious of unnoted imperfections in her, and they loom large before him. There is, at times, a sharpness and shrillness in the upper register of her speaking voice that almost suggests irritability. She would never win a gold medal as a housekeeper, and one has to be fiercely hungry to enjoy her cooking. Her conversational charm seems to have become rather commonplace when subjected to the test of a continuous performance. Her hair is not always rigorously brushed into orthodoxy, and she does not seem to worry much about the immaculateness of her attire around the house. The items in the catalogue of progressive revelation vary; their importance depends largely on the spirit of the interpretation. They are a bit disillusioning, it is true, but they are not fatal. If wisely taken in their early stages they may be cured; if incurable they may be silently accepted with joy that they are not worse. Fine tact may accomplish much in rendering them unobtrusive, as people living along the line of a railroad learn not to hear the noise of the trains. We are all human and have faults, failings and foibles. We have no right to expect perfection unless we can give it in return. Perfect people, too, would be awfully tiresome to live with; their stained-glass view of things would seem a constant sermon without intermission, a continuous moral snub of superiority to our self-respect. Let us not consign the Venus de Milo to the rubbish heap bacause she has no arms; she is greater without them than any other marble lady, fully armed, in all the world's history. Let us accept the little failings of those we love as we do a mortgage on a valuable property; if we cannot remove it or decrease it, pay the interest and then forget it. Concentrating on the positives, the virtues of each other, in married life, may reveal some trait —a fine sense of honor, a sterling honesty, a courage that recognizes no Waterloo, a sweetness of sympathy and tenderness that never fails, or some other characteristic—a trait so priceless that 790 IMPROVEMENT ERA. it sweeps away criticism on petty failings as a rushing mountain stream carries to the sea the dead wood that threatens its serenity. When the young wife asks her husband to point out all her little faults so that she can correct them, any little thing that does not come quite up to his ideal, for she "loves him sq much that she wants to be absolutely perfect in his eyes," let him realize the sacred sweetness, the instinctive fineness, the tender, wistful longing of its consecration and show himself worthy of it. This cry of the emotions, this high-tide of a mood of genuineness is a crucial moment. Conscious that he is nearing the thin ice of heart diplomacy, let him tenderly assure her with a caress that she is flawless as the Kohinoor and gently smile away the possibility of even perfection being as perfect as she. The real work of mending little flaws can be considered later quietly without furnishing a detailed estimate of the needed repairs. He has given her an ideal to live up to, not a feeling of restless protest to be overcome. Mutual confession of each other's faults is the shortest cut to a misunderstanding, though the talk begin in the balmiest atmosphere of flowers and perfume, sweetness and seemingly storm-proof confidence. The first difference of opinion that belongs to the "quarrel" is important for the manner in which it is met. When the romance of the new companionship loses the charm of its initial novelty, the warning click of trifles, a sudden jolt or jar of the home machinery, may threaten the possibility of any hope for the future. The first storm usually arises from a trifle and in a few moments a gentle zephyr of misunderstanding becomes a whirlwind. There are only three or four moves on each side, and in surveying the emotional wreckage, both may be dazed and unable to say how it started. Each may say mo^e than is meant; each may take the other's words too seriously; each oversensitive and hugging a petty pride, may feel aggrieved and too hurt to think of instant attempt at restoring peace and sunshine. There may be sobs^ protests and wounded dignity on the part of one, while the other may become coldly, stolidly calm, as if carved in mahogany. It matters not who spoke the first word; it is the fault of both if the inharmony continues. It may have been a difference LITTLE PROBLEMS OF MARRIED LIFE. 791 of opinion in which each was right but neither had the right to force that opinion on the other. The larger nature will ever be first to make overtures of reconciliation. A slight misunderstanding may be invaluable to both as a warning, as a revelation of tendencies of a characteristic of one that the other must recognize,as a small blaze may inspire a realizing sense of needed precautions in a home, that may make a conflagration later hardly possible. The two should mark the trait that caused the trouble as a rock in the channel, a dangerous reef that should be removed if possible; if not removable, it should have a bell and a light so that it may be recognized and avoided in the matrimonial seamanship. When the air of a discussion suddenly grows sultry, and the temptation comes to cap one sarcasm with another more sarcastic there should be a pause. Orators facing an audience and feeling a twinge of stage fright take a moment to get their bearings, to pull themselves together and conquer the invading nervousness; then they speak their first few words in a low voice, slowly, gently and deliberately. The orator's pause taken in the early stages of a breakfast table discussion often guarantees peace. When a first misunderstanding is permitted to degenerate into harsh and bitter words of contempt, they leave a stain. They soil the ermine of delicacy and fineness in relation of the two that only the bigness of a great love can ever quite restore; they make repetition easier and reparation harder. When it is all past and the sun shines bright again, talking it over and holding rehearsals and post-mortems is unwise. It should be buried from memory forever as a body is committed to the depths of the ocean in a funeral at sea. Let us forgive and forget; if we hold a hurt feeling and adopt a martyr pose we show that we forget that we have forgiven. It is what follows misunderstanding that really counts. Does it leave a train of bitter words and recrimination that becomes tatooed into memory, a fit of sulks, tears and indifferences that no sunshine of loving words can banish, closed Bluebeard chambers of remembrance whose doors we shut with a slam if in later years memory opens them inadvertently? Is the pettiness of either or both to permit this to eclipse the sun of life's happiness? Is it )! 'MPROVEMENT ERA. thus that the discords of a moment effect us, or do they bring sweeter music in the days after, because they are now understood and vanquished, or, unconquered, do they recur more frequently and with greater intensity? Little misunderstandings may be summer thunder-showers that clear the air of the home, leaving it sweet, pure and balmy; or cold, drizzly November rains that depress and deaden. There may be none of this little discord when the individuality of either is suppressed; when one personality absolutely dominates the other; when one always meekly echoes what the other says; when one meekly walks the matrimonal chalk-line; when the husband or wife has been "trained." There may be quiet here, but it is not really peace; it is the torpor of pale, colorless lives, of submerged individuality; it is the unruffled, stagnant smoothness of a mere pond as compared with the tonic, fresh, free motion of the living sea. Where love has faded into cold indifference, where a tacit truce of tolerance is established between two to whom marriage has become a mirage fading away into the perspective of memory, there may be no moments of misunderstanding or inharmony becausd they are in the dangerous mood of "don't care" when emotion seems paralyzed. vVhere there is a deep, genuine, absorbing love in the springtide of married life there may still be inharmony because the exalted ideals, the heart-hunger, the sensitive fineness, is satisfied only with supreme recognition and fullest response. Love itself may grow unduly arrogant and demanding. A misunderstanding may be but the heart's confession of a subtle hurt, the expression of the perfect dependence of one on the other in the smallest trifles; every word, look or tone has an exaggerated value. It may be antedoted instantly by a word of explanation, or, unexpressed, it may be born in silence and nursed by wounded pride. By the strange power that trifles have to prove the fixed idea, it may grow into a grievance that, feeding upon itself, will weaken the very foundations of faith and trust. Where love is fine, there is, in misunderstanding and conflict of view, an instinct that keeps the inharmony within bounds of refinement and courtesy. Unselfish love has, too, a recuperative power that restores faith and confidence quickly to the normal LITTLE PROBLEMS OF MARRIED LIFE. 793 if the disturbing element has been but a semblance of wrong rather than a reality. Sometimes the spring-tide of married life brings more serious problems. Sometimes in the very honeymoon there may come revelations that kill happiness in its soul, and one, stricken, like a wounded animal, longs only to be alone, to suffer in silence this appalling grief. There is no hope; no words can explain, no acts can atone. If not so absolutely fatal as this, there may be quarrels more portentous than mere inharmonies, repetitions of doubts and jealousies, spectors that do not down, the discoveries of chasms of indifference that cannot be bridged, the pang of wounds that do not heal, the constant, dominant insistence of one note of pain or of loss, the chill of incompatibility when any trifle may precipitate an earthquake. This is not one of the ''little problems;" it is too much like living on the suburbs of Vesuvius ;o lead to happiness without a radical revolution, and a new start with new wisdom on the part of both. Points of difference in the individualities that seem antagonistic and destructive of harmony may by blending become a dual virtue. ■ The extravagance of one of the partners in matrimony, held in check by the tendency to penuriousness on the part of the other, may have a neutralizing effect on both. The sturdy independence of the man should give tone and strength to the gentleness of the wife. Marriage requires balance. If both learn to live in the proper spirit towards each other, faults become softened, fuller understanding takes the sting from the seeming pain, kindness displaces unkindness as sunshine banishes darkness, and the two come into closer harmony, mutually completing and complementing each other. Marriage is what the two personalities involved make it. For art, music, oratory, authorship and other phases of power, it is conceded that success presupposes ability, desire, determination and training, but many seem to think that mere entrance into matrimony should of itself bring success, prospertity and happiness, that it should accomplish all these things as if it were a birthright to be demanded instead of a fortune to be earned by their united effort. ("Respect for Each Other's Individuality," is the title of the second article in this series, to appear in the August number.)