Little Problems of Married Life VII

Little Problems of Married Life*

BY WILLIAM GEORGK JORDAN VII. Marriage Success on Business Lines. Matrimony is the greatest business in the world. It employs the largest number of people, for the longest period of time, and has the bulk of the world's capital invested in it. Most of the other business enterprises are held in trust for this one. They are tributary to it, feeders to it, providers for it, preparers for it. There is no faintest shadow of irreverence in calling matrimony a business, no slightest tinge of disrespect to its sweetness, its sacredness, its sentiment, its poetry or its possibilities. .Marriage is the greatest business, for it keeps busy most of the people. In its perfection and in its ideal, it means two living at their highest and best as individuals and in united harmony. It is consecrated duality in unity. Itmeans life partnerships of two in the pursuit of happiness. The most important business should be conducted on business lines. There should be constant, concentrated effort to make it a success. Success comes not only from drifting, but wisely working. If men and women put into their married life the same seriousness of thought, intensity of purpose, patience, sacrifice and determination to make it a success that they devote to seeking to make a business prosper, the world would be transformed. Failures would be few divorce, the bankruptcy of matrimony, ;

would be rare and the two could command success by their united determination to win it. Success in matrimony is in reality a far simpler problem than success in business. In the commercial world, sometimes, despite man his finest foresight, his wisest plans, his keenest judgment, a may have bravely to face defeat, knownig he has done his best. Those whom he has trusted may betray some new invention may :

suddenly supersede his valuable machinery and degrade it to the rank of mere metal. A financial cyclone may wreck in an hour the towering strength of years of toil and effort and str ig

"Copyright, 1910, by Fleming H, ReveH Company.

380 IMPROVEMENT ERA powerful competitor by cruel tactics may ruin him. He may be engulfed maelstrom of another's failure. in the lu business he is dependent on people he cannot always control,on conditions he cannot always master. But success in marriage depends finally and solely on the two themselves. It is not what they have but what they are, not what comes to them but how they meet it, that counts. Sickness, sorrow, trial, misfortune and poverty may even make them nearer and dearer to each other, in truer union and finer unity. What they suffer for each other and with each other brings them closer together ; what they suffer from each other gradually forces them apart. Man does not expect to succeed in business by merely starting it and honoring it with the sunshine of his presence. He realizes it is not an automatic music machine where he has merely to put on a success record, start the mechanism, and then sit back comfortably and delight his ears with the music of prosperity. If he wants dividends of success he must pay the assessments of effort. If we want real lasting harmony and melody in married life we must make our own music. It means the collaboration of two, never the lonely contribution of one. In business when problems arise a man seeks to solve them if inharmonies threaten to destroy his success he seeks to remove them : if one method fails he tries another. He does not let things drift or work themselves out some way ; he knows it is his business to find outwhere things are wrong and how he can right them ;

he does not shut his eyes to troubles and think he is curing them by obscuring them. Men are often blind, or resigned in a cowardly way, to unpleasant conditions in the home partnership that they would never surrender to in their office business. They often accept as inevitable in their home life what they could change if they only would. It is unjust to both for the hsuband or wife to accept any wrong conditon. if any amount of effort will set it right. When all methods fail, bearing bravelv may be moral strength : before they have been even tested, bearing meekly is sheer weakness. There are people who fan themselves into serene self-satisfactionwith the thought that they are heroically accepting the shadows and shallows of married life, its preventable pain, sorrow and discord, when they are really only too lazy mentally or inert morally to take a bold, firm stand to win the freedom of

LITTLE PROBLEMS OF MARRIED LIFE 381 thought, harmony and peace they desire.It is not patient tolerance, fine forgiving and forgetting, gentle bearing and hopeful waiting. It is a false resignation that their reverence for the clinking approval of the cash register would not permit them to tolerate in their businessdown-town. They are not considering matrimony as a business they must make succeed; they are degrading it to the gamble class. They have the assumed airy indifference of a man who has drawn a blank in a lottery and is trying hard to forget it. They are not seeking to make the best of some phase of married life, for this implies direct, consecrated, purposeful effort ; but they are becoming resigned to the worst of it. It is a brand of hopelessness that does not deserve a hero medal. There are little rifts in the lute of happiness in married life, that, unnoted or uncorrected, widen with the months and years until the music of love, sweetness, tenderness and comradeship becomes mute. So little might have saved the situation in the beginning. There are trifling differences and discords that a few moments ©f listening, a few moments of kindly wisdom, conference and explanation might set right. But foolish pride may deter and a heart is wounded unrest, vague misunderstanding, ;

chafing protest and blighting suspicion dethrone confidence, and a sad growing apart may darken the years. They manage these matters better in business. The conditions are different, the elements are not identical, but the principles are the same. When an excited customer enters a business house with some grievance, real or fancied, parades a schedule of wrongs and injustices as long as a tariff bill and starts in on a high-keyed monologue or protest, exploding epithets of denunciation and filling the air with sparks of phrases sulphurous with indignation, the wise man of business remains cool and calm. The temptation to become emotionally overheated and to match sarcasm with sarcasm he resists. He realizes that by losing his temper he may lose a customer, that it would be unwise, it would not pay. He waits patiently for a comma of intermission, a slight slackening in the cascading torrent of speech. He smiles apologies, he presses the soft pedal of expression, he explains, defers, conciliates. He argues gently, appeals to reason, to justice, to pride ; he seeks to create an atmosphere of cordiality. He feels a pleasing glow of triumph in the conscious-

382 IMPROVEMENT ERA ness that he has met an unpleasant situation wisely, calmed the angry waters by the oil of his tact and perhaps converted an irritated customer into almost a friend. He has mastered his mood for dollars. Why does he not try the same method at home? Why does he not answer gently the first few words of a discord there, disarm the sting of a sarcasm by a smile, forego the victory of his logical position by a word of tenderness or a caress, that gives him a finer triumph through a sweet appeal to sentiment, the logic of the heart? The phrase that irritated him to retort still more bitter may have been unintentional, unweighted with the meaning he ascribes to it. It may have been only the expression of her physical nervousness, the strain of a day of hard duties, vague longing, repressed weariness, worry, an unmastered pain of grief manifesting themselves in a way she did not intend or hardly knew. It is as a sigh sometimes creeps up from the heart to the lips without our knowing just why it came or how much it meant. She really needed sympathy, and sweetness, and soothing, and comfort understanding not condemnation. When a man finds that he and his business partner do not agree, when friction intensifies and they do not confer and plan together as of old, he does not storm and rage and fume and thus widen their separation. He does not build up a solid wall of coldness and silence and studied indifference. He waits for an opportune moment, nerves himself to be easy, gracious and kindly, and, without anger or blame, talks fully, frankly and freely. He says in a tone that will not make his partner feel that he is being put through the third degree: "We do not seem to have struck it right somehow recently; we are on the wrong trail we are drifting and we must find our ;

way back. We are in this business together to make it a success it needs us both we need each other. There is something wrong ;

somehow. I may be at fault or you may be to blame, perhaps neither of us is cut out for an archangel. Let us talk it all over quietly and see if we can get our bearings ; let us call a new deal and start all over." There is a manly, honest, business ring to this and if any hope of unity remain this spirit of conference will reveal it. But there may be in his home firm a little woman who realizes that they too are drifting-. She knows down in her heart that

• LITTLE PROBLEMS OF MARRIED LIFE 383 she loves him and she needs him and that he loves her, but somehow little discords are separating them. The song dies on her lips when she is working in the little home that once was their heaven, and there is a moisture comes in her eyes that dims them but does not bring the relief of real tears. It seems as though she were in a fog, and she has lost her bearings, and the love-laden craft of their happiness has somehow slipped from its moorings in the silence and the dark and is drifting far out to the great open sea. And she feels hopeless and helpless, she wants to do the right thing but she does not know what she should do or say that will be right. They are just drifting, and she is tired and worn, heart-sick and heart-hungry, and she wants to be comforted by loving arms as we soothe a frightened, sobbing child. She cannot find her way back alone. — If the husband, so wise in his office, were to transplant his business wisdom to the home, he could bring back the atmosphere of the old courtship days in a single hour. Seeking not the blame of either but the happiness of both, with no shadow of recrimination, he could tell her sweetly, seriously and calmly, with the occasional punctuation mark of a caress or a gentle pressure of the hand, that they need each other and they somewhere stumbled on a wrong trail and must have go back together hand in hand to find the right path, and they will get light and love from each other and they will forgive and forget and they too will "have a new deal and begin all over." The resulting happiness is foreordained. It is merely business wisdom. It is consecrated common sense, bringing the two home partners closer together and inspiring the home firm with new life, courage and confidence. Success in business life demands constant watchfulness, wisdom and work. No business thrives on neglect. Like a clock, it requires regular winding and frequent setting; left to itself it runs down. A plot of grass, whether the size of a pocket handkerchief or a ten acre lot, left uncared, runs to weeds. There are men who take no more genuine interest in their home beyond paying the bills, than if they were merely occasional guests. They seem to regard home as a mere dormitory and a dining room. They often wonder, in a vague way, why their marriage is not successful. If it were a success it would not be merely a wonder, it would be a miracle.

384 IMPROVEMENT ERA There are wives who spend most of their days outside the home walls, devoting their golden hours of possibility to dress, visits, theaters, gossip, idleness, frivolity and amusement. The house that they might convert into a shrine of love and peace and happiness is delegated to the care of servants; their children are practically orphaned, under the trusteeship of nurses. These women are losing the realities of life in chasing shadows. They are mere lodgers in their own homes. They are too much interested in the sidelines of life to spend earnest thought on making the real business, marriage, a success. They are often the ones who, in bursts of feminine confidence, bemoan the failure of their married life and display their robes of martyrdom. They are incendiaries of their own happiness and that of another, yet so self-blinded that they delight to collect the insurance returns of unmerited sympathy. In business there are minor annoyances, trivial irritations and petty trials, usually taken for what they are worth, accepted as "all in the day's work," seen in their proper perspective, passed by with a smile and a shrug of the shoulders and forgotten in a few moments. In married life trifles are often exaggerated, augmented by argument, given a fictitious value, vitality and force out of all proportion to their real import. Sometimes it takes only three minutes from unjust impatience over an underdone chop to a fever-heat temperature, followed by thunder rumblings of protest, dark clouds, lightning flashes of super-heated indignation, sudden coldness, falling barometer, and a rain of tears. One stalks out of the dining room, leaving a trail of smoke and sparks of irritation like a speeding locomotive, while the other buries her head in her arms near the untouched dishes and just sobs in the silence, for her world of happiness has come to an end —again. Electricity sometimes seems snail-like in its motion compared with this sudden, silly change of atmosphere caused by magnifying a trifle that should have been ignored altogether or made the subject of a jest that would bring smiles and sunshine to both. The whole attitude is wrong; it is all unnecessary, cruel, preventable. It really is poor business judgment, shutting off rich dividends of possible happiness for a trifle. In successful business partnership there is cheerful conference and counsel whenever it seems necessary to unite the best

LITTLE PROBLEMS OF MARRIED LIFE S85 thought of both on the problem of both, but there is respect for each other's position, duties and responsibility. They avoid even the suggestion or semblance of intrusion or interference. They realize that their united strength comes from the fact that each is doing a work distinctly different from the other. This business wisdom of non-interference might well be introduced into many home firms. When a husband is tempted by a meddling spirit of bossism to run every detail of the home and assumes omniscience on every phase of housekeeping from the cellar to the cupolu, let him think for a moment how his partner down-town would resent a similar intrusion and then quietly subside into silence. The wife, too, must realize that while her keen, fresh mind may serve her husband in some business problem that troubles him and which he carefully presents to her, she should be satisfied with being ready to help in need but she usurps undue ;

authority when she actually attempts to control his business for him. No business is really successful unless it is yielding fair dividends on the capital invested. Even this success may be considered a partial failure if wiser management will double or treble itsreturns and if many of its possible revenue-producing resources remain unworked and neglected. A man does not flatter himself that his business is a success if it merely pays expenses, yet he may be too easily resigned to a marriage partnership that is just jogging along, in a dull, lifeless, colorless way, with hardly enough vitality to have even a serious discord. It is like a patient who is too weak even to cough. That home firm requires not merely revitalizing but reorganization on a new, real, pulsing, red-blood basis. When a business -firm is passing through deep financial waters, when there is trouble and discord in pulling through a crisis and dissolution of the firm seems tremblingly near, they seek to keep the inharmony secret from even employees, who may perhaps inadvertently reveal it and precipitate a crash. Husband and wife are often not so careful nor so prudent in safeguarding the sanctity of home conditions as they should be and often betray the impending insolvency of the home firm in weak confidences that may make mastery of the condition almost impossible. The darker the situation the more it demands the strongest light of wisdom to illumine it. The more nearly snapping is the tie be-

3*6 IMPROVEMENT KRA tween husband and wife the more insistent is the necessity that Reputation needs most protection at they should stand together. its weakest point. There are times in business, as all men know, when enforced expansion, the better fortifying of prosperity already attained or heroic effort to keep from being forced back by conditions, requires the investment of new capital. In married life there are many trying hours, when the glooming clouds of doubt and fear hang low on the horizon, when one, or both, is passing through the dark valley of a temptation, a trial, a test, when the pressure of conditions threatens to silence forever their trust in each other. There are times when they enter a dead calm of life where no faint breeze of inspiration or impulse fills the idle sails of the era ft of their living, and they feel that they are slipping away from each other. Then new investment is necessary to keep the matrimonial stock from falling too far below par, new capital of love, faith, loyalty, consideration, cheerfulness and tenderness. In marriage true love, trust and real comradeship often unconsciously utilize all the wisest business wisdom in making the union that is so near and dear and all to them a success. By their own sterling common sense and fine soul instinct, thev solve many problems so naturally that it hardly seems they have recognized the problems existed. ("Little Compromises that Make for Happiness." will be the next chapter in this series.)

It seldom happens that four elders from one ward are privileged to work in one conference, but the four elders herewith, who are all fromSugar House ward ;

Granite stake, have been laboring in the Scottish conference. The names are as follows, reading from left to right, back row: Willard Richards, Charles O. Kimball; front row: Paul S. Richards, George W. Teasdale. The progress of the work in the neighborhood of their labors is as satisfactory as could be wished Elders of the Scottish Mission,