Little Problems of Married Life, II

Little Problems of Married Life.* BY WILLIAM GEORGE JORDAN. II.—Respect for Each Other's Individuality. True marriage is the consecrated comradeship of husband and wife made permanent by love and mutual respect. It is the harmonizing of two individualities in a common interest, not the sacrifice of one to the other. The suppression of the individuality of either endangers the real happiness of both. With the insistence of either to be first, matrimony ceases to be a team and becomes a tandem. When the husband constantly plays barometer to his wife's weather, when she is the voice and he the echo, when she is the substance and he is the shadow, it is not a true copartnership. He is merely the junior member of the firm, having his name on the sign, and holding the post of cashier, but with no voice in the management. He is really suffering from anemia of the individuality. He needs to develop a few red corpuscles of self-respect and protest; he should cease to be merely a minority stockholder in her thinking; he should rebel against the phoncgraphic instinct of speaking only what has been talked into him. They tell us that husband and wife are one; but it is a parody on unity if either wants to be that one. It would be as foolish as if the hour-hand or the minute-hand were to claim supreme importance in the matter of telling the time. Their united action is based on perfected individuality in unison; it means harmony not competition. * Copyright, 1910, by Fleming H. Revell Company.

918 IMPROVEMENT ERA. If the wife be afraid to give expression to her thoughts, her views or her opinions, merely because she never quite knows how he will take them, there is something wrong with both. If she automatically looks up at her husband, reading his emotions in his face,like an engineer with his eye on the steam gauge, to see if her tentative words meet a nod of approval or a storm cloud of protest, she has not the courage of her individuality, nor the selfrespect that compels its recognition. Her attitude reveals a cowardly fear that is bener.th the dignity of wifehood. It is unjust to one, therefore unjust to both. If she has to meet him ever with conscious tact; if she has to look out ever for storm-signals of change in his mood; if sh& lives in constant terror of offending him at any moment by touching inadvertently the sore thumb of a prejudice; and has to go around ever with an oil-can to lubricate the bearings of his self-approval, she should heed the warning cf the alarm-clock of her irjured self-respect and waken to the realization that she is desecratingly unjust to her own individuality. Love may survive this disrespect but it is not fed by it; love may persist for a time in spite of it, but never because of it. It is a mortgage on love that must be removed or that love will finally be wiped out on foreclosure proceedings in the name of the out-worn patience of the heart. Our real life is the expression of our individuality, our inalienable right to live our own full, free life at its highest and best. It means the fine flowering of our strength and the conquest of our weakness. It develops naturally and truest in the pure ozone of freedom, limited only by the rights of others and our duties to th^m. Between husband and wife there is no basic conflict of rights; there can only be conflict of wrongs. They should be their true selves, ready and glad to take loving counsel and suggestion from each other, but not weakly suffering to be poured into the mold of the other's ideas and ideals. They should be strong alone that they may be strong in union. Better the frailest flower, growing upright on its own stem, than the most vigorous vine made possible only by a supporting oak. Where the individuality of either is suppressed, it means that there is conceit, arrogance, selfishness or petty tyranny on the part of the other, or a masterful personality that stifles the

LITTLE PROBLEMS OF MARRIED LIFE. 919 expression of the real life and soul of the suppressed, as certain trees kill all other vegetation around them. Paying constant tribute to another's will or bowing meekly to another's superiority is antagonistic to the soul of love. In true marriage, under the inspiration of community of thought and the influence of a common environment, under the warm glow of mutual love, esteem, trust and dependence of each on the other, the real individuality of each develops as naturally as a flower grows in the sunlight. The happiest marriages are those where love is perfect unity and identity of view on the great essentials; perfect freedom in non-essentials; and perfect harmony even in differences of view. Perfect unity on essentials means that on the broad questions of their commom life there is unanimity of view, a solid rock foundation of happiness and trust that no minor differences can threaten for a moment. Perfect freedom in non-essentials means that it is not absolutely necessary for husband and wife to like the same book, the same picture, the same play, place or person, if each has the proper respect for the honesty of the other's view, and confidence in each other's willingness to change that view if shown proper reason for so doing. As they grow in closer unity, the tastes and sentiments of husband and wife will naturally come into closer accord and agreement on all subjects affecting their common welfare. But this unity can never be foiced; it cannot be developed through fear, reached through a mere hunger to please, never simulated, nor acquired by tact. These give only the semblance, never the reality. The individuality of each is developed only by mutual love, confidence, and free, spontaneous action. True love hungers for spontaneous expression, welcomes it, joying more in a trifle that speaks instinctivtly as a voice of love from the heart, than in a greater expression coming from the head—an act done because it was expected, or as a duty or bit of policy. With two living together in the closeness of day-by-day companionship there are sometimes little traits of character, little peculiarities of temperament, little phases of disposition, little habits in word, or look or act in the one that jar and fret and chafe the nature of the other. They form no part of individuality;

920 IMPROVEMENT ERA. they are but acquired eccentricity that it should be a joy to master and control merely because the sweetness and deference implied in the act of changing is a tribute to the other. It is love illuminating a trifle. But there are personal theories with which one should not expect the other necessarily to follow in lock-step, and the other should feel forced to accept. The wife may have been led to worship at the shrine of a food fad through an article printed on the "woman's page" that becomes her gospel. She may feel that the physical salvation of the race comes from eating bread three days old,and may unwisely seek to force him to discipleship, because she "knows it is good for him." He may prefer a shorter life soothed with fresh bread rather than a longer existence on the new terms. Let her revel in her petrified passe nutriment to her heart's content, but she is giving post-graduate courses in hypocrisv and protest when she makes meals at home an ordeal, as he silently munches the dry crusts of her theory. He suffers it as a temporary trial, feeling confident that the reign of staleness will be brief, and lets his imagination run riot in the thought of the red-hot muffins and all the other quarantined delicacies he will order down town for lunch ji^t to square himself somehow with his self-respect. If he, having heard from a man on the train that the fountain of youth, health and beauty rises from going without breakfa t, omits this meal for a few mornings and then brags of the twenty years that have been taken from his age in four days, let him prove his theory by the fresh ruddiness and glow of health he displays and the sunlighting of his disposition, rather than by tyrannically issuing a two-meal-a-day edict for the home. It may be wiser for him to be a bit selfish with his new-found wisdom rather than through mistaken generosity and lack of respect for her individuality try to force her to take unwilling stock in his panacea. He may find it really prudent, too, for it will make it easier for him when he wants to edge back to the orthodox breakfast plan like a lonely little runaway boy creeping back home. Even though it should prove best for him it does not guarantee it will benefit another with a different constitution and by-laws. If he has become a zealous devotee to pure air and is happy with every window wide open and a young tornado merrily galing

LITTLE PROBLEMS OF MARRIED LIFE. 921 through the dining-room so that they have to put paper-weights on the dishes, he should realize that she may not enjoy dining in furs and taking cold food with numb fingers. If he cannot be brought to accept Ibsen as an inspired apostle of optimism and the joys of living on the higher levels, if Ibsen really seems to him to be nearly as cheerful as a ride in a tunnel on a dark night with the car lights extinguished, and he does not want to invest in her enthusiasm for a new-found literary god as "the dramatic genius of the age," let them sweetly and smilingly agree to differ if argument develops fervur. He may later forsake his well-thumbed Shakespeare should the higher illumination come to him and flood his soul with light. If her adoption of some new philosophy of living brings to her calmness, rest, peace and the solution of life's problems, making her more kind, gentle, charitable, loving and unselfish and seems a constant inspiration, it is unwise to seek to capture his conversion by an unrelenting assault of argument, protest, discussion and appeal. He has a right to his option of non-acceptance as fully and freely as her choice of acceptance. If her living does not vindicate the rightness and finality of her belief, if her life does not convince, her argument will only irritate but never convert. The only parts of our individuality that should be suppressed are our weaknesses, our faults, our pettiness, those phases of character or temperament that prevent our radiating our best to those around us. We can never be our true selves until we make this a reality in our living. Respect for each other's individuality touches in some way the heart of every problem of married life. This respect is based on justice, and justice wrongs no right but rights every wrong. It is the Golden Rule raised from mere theory to the dignity of a living reality. In the home it means freedom, right, sympathy, tolerance, harmony and peace. Determining that neither shall suffer from the other, they are strengthened to suffer for and with each other whatever trials life may bring. In their philosophy of prepositions is wrapped up the secret of truest happiness in married life for both. This respect has two vital phases: we must not only respect

922 IMPROVEMENT ERA. the individuality of the other but must demand that our own be equally respected. While never invading the rights of others, we should with equal firmness resent the invasion of our own. This implies no petty captiousness in trifles, no supersensitiveness of an inflamed egotism,no disregard of the privilege of making little compromises and concessions, the joy of sacrifices and surrenders that bring new happiness to love. Neither has the right to make the other the victim of his or her temper, selfishness, cruelty, tyranny, meanness or injustice, and either is wrong to submit. We are unjust to ourselves when we meekly suffer what we have no right to suffer. It is not a virtue of noble bearing; it is the vice of cowardice. We are sapping the very citadel of our own strength; we are weakening ourselves for the battle of life, starving our very soul. There are countless instances where this is mental, physical, emotional, and, sometimes, moral—suicide. There are grim tragedies, of which the world may know nothing, in domestic life where the wife lives tremblingly in the shadow of a husband's fierce temper, or his wild, uncontrolled, senseless jealousy. Smiling, bright, gay, witty, he seems the very life of the social company gathered around his table. But there may come to her, seemingly only a table-length but really a whole world apart from him, a quick gasp, and a tremor, with a pain in her heart as though a hand of steel were suddenly gripping it with a deadening pressure when she sees for a second a certain look on his face that no eyes but her own noted, none might even understand had they seen. She knows its meaning as the plainsman sees all the devastating havoc of a tornado foretold in the spiral whirling of a single leaf caught in an air vortex. She knows the afterward; she knows that hardly will the key have been turned smilingly on the last departing guest before the storm will burst in all its fury. She will cower anew under unjust, bitter recrimination, slurs, sneers, sarcasm that eats like an acid into memory and maddening taunts that blister and blight. We hear much of the nobility and the moral grandeur of bearing and forbearing, but there are times when bearing becomes a weakness, a cowardice, a crime against self-respect. Peace at any price is not peace—it is smothered war. Things are never settled until they are settled right. The wife's time for meeting

LITTLE PROBLEMS OF MARRIED LIFE. 923 such temper was at the beginning of her married life, at its first manifestation, in its faintest phases, before it had fattened and grown tyrannous through non-resistance. In the beginning she was at the maximum of her power to cope with the wrong; the evil was at its minimum; the man himself was more pliable and more easily led and controlled. In the beginning should she have met the issue, taking a firm, final, unalterable stand, using every weapon in the armory of her wisdom. Then should she show unmistakably, with dignity, character, calmness, courage, that never would she tolerate or permit the indignity or humiliation of such a scene. If it cannot be settled then, with an understanding that makes repetition impossible, there is no hope for the future of either. Better a single hard battle to a finish, than a long siege of torture with constant skirmishes for years, with the wife's defeat in the end guaranteed. There are many similar problems in married life, perhaps less serious, that threaten to kill the peace of the home, that must be faced at their very inception, not in the heat of anger but coolly, calmly, courageously at the very beginning, as medical science seeks to conquer a serious disease in its earliest stages before it has gained headway. The injustice we unprotestingly accept, we feed; the selfishness we continuously humor, we strengthen; the cruelty to which we meekly submit, has its fangs sharpened by our docility that it may later rend us. If these situations were wisely met in the beginning by either husband or wife, much future unhappiness for both, and, perhaps, even disunion later, might be spared. It is easier to extinguish a match than a conflagration; easier to control the course of a mighty river at its trickling source than at its mouth where it empties into the ocean; easier to purify the infected waters of a single well at Mecca than to conquer the subsequent plague affecting millions. Nature meant husband and wife to supplement each other, to be stronger because of their union, differing in their qualities, in their powers and possibilities, but harmonized and uniting for the best solution of their life problems. The husband can find no help in the counsel of his wife in an emergency if he has stifled her

924 IMPROVEMENT ERA. power of individual thinking, or permitted it to become dulled and deadened through disuse. And the tastes and pleasures which were her resources in the years before she met him need not be renounced, merely because they fail to appeal to him. The books she loves to read, the picture which for her holds a beautiful meaning—such things may fail to touch him, but that is no reason that her joy in them should be spoiled. If he finds no pleasure in music, this in itself is no reason why she should shut this avenue of inspiration from her life, if it carry with it any heartening message to her soul. If either attempt to rule the other it will be found but a petty victory, an empty triumph. The lasting good of each must be in love, raising each to the highest power of individualty, with no thought of competition, no desire of superiority, so that they move, hand in hand, towards a common goal, the good of each being ever the joy of both. In this spirit of true respect for individuality they will find that most of their problems will be solved and made clear and luminant under the glowing sunshine of their trustful confidence, conference and comradeship. (The next chapter treats on "More Courtship After Marriage.'') Elder Culbert Bowen of Tooele, and James H. Esplin of Orderville, Utah, write from Nebraska City, Nebraska, that although an interval of four or five years has passed since elders were in that place, they still find the testimonies of former elders alive in the hearts of some of the people. On their first arrival, January last, the attitude of the people towards them was a little cold, but at present they are meeting with a favorable reception by the most influential of the people. The magazine articles which have lately appeared have not tended to their injury, but have rather proved a benefit to them, as the articles have given them an opportunity to present their side of the story.