--- 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: 15 number: 11 published: 1912-09 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. XIII," *Improvement Era* 15, no. 11 (September 1912): 991–995.' source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera15011unse 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: improvementera15011unse start_page: 991 end_page: 995 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1912-09) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera15011unse publication_year: 1912 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 1912, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # Little Problems of Married Life. XIII Little Problems of Married Life BY WILLIAM GEORGE JORDAN XIII — Talking Home Matters Outside Have you ever met women who seem continually flying a flag of distress from the ship of matrimony? They give monologues on the slightest provocation, and often on the very slightest acquaintance, on the ever-new subject of their home troubles. They seem to be a private press association for syndicating news of domestic cares, worries and miseries. They keep their memories of home discord all labelled, classified and dated, and seem to take a collector's delight in parading them. It is a false advertising instinct that publishes the weakness of the matrimonial firm. If the sky of the home is overcast and the sun of love is temporarily darkened by doubt or misunderstanding, it is not wise to bring in the neighbors to witness the eclipse. If there is a little sand in the sugar of home happiness, it really seems better to concentrate on the sweetness that remains than to carry around samples of the grit in envelopes of conversational confidence. In the business world, when a firm has to pass through a period of sunless days and stress and storm ; when they are long on hope and short on prosperity; when the partners enthusiastically agree with each other's policy; when the present looks grim and the future grimmer, they guard their confidences carefully; they fear their troubles may be known outside ; they realize that they are facing a problem that must be solved from within, not exploited from without. They feel an esprit de corps that makes it seem disloyalty to talk matters over outside the breastworks. And in married life love, loyalty, dignity, a basic mutual respect should make this guarding of the sanctity of the home even greater. Talking home matters outside is advertising the insolvency of harmony. It weakens the credit and reputation of the ♦Copyright, 1910, by Fleming H. Revell Company. 992 IMPROVEMENT ERA. home firm, and often causes unjust ratings in the Bradstreet of society. A temporary trouble, that may be merely a week's cloud in the home itself, may be recorded as a "Damaging tornado," if given intensity of life by being idly talked of outside the family walls. Gossip is a natural weed in the garden of conversation ; it grows so freely and spontaneously that we need never plant with our own hands the seed of needless criticism, comment and condemnation of ourselves and of those who should be nearest and dearest to us. There are times in the home when some grievance, real or fancied, swells our feeling to a dangerous high-tide of emotion; pique or pride may add a new pang to suffering, and, carried along by the torrent, we feel we must tell it to some one. It hardly matters what ears hear the story, so that we may have our hearts filled with the consoling music of sweet sympathy. It may be a natural hunger, but it is none the less dangerous. Its very nature may. make it unjust. In the intensity of feeling we concentrate in our complaint on the climax, the word, phrase or act that seems the essence of our hurt. But we rarely tell the true story truly ; we unknowingly suppress part, slur over in innocent lightness our part of it — an incendiary word that added new fire, an unkind silence, perhaps, that made us equally guilty. This is the element that makes the telling unjust and intensifies its disloyalty; we eagerly drink in the sympathy, feel a moment's balm of righteousness in hearing the other condemned ; and it usually intensifies and exaggerates our sense of hurt. But when our wiser judgment returns and night dawns into day, and the bright sun-light pours in through the windows, we see things in a more normal perspective. Our high-strung emotions of the night before seem unjustified, foolish, with the garish disorder and confusion of a banquet-table still standing the morning after. We would give so much to buy back our confidence of the night before, and would pay a good premium Just to be able to lock our secret again in the silence of the unspoken. But that is one thing that all our most earnest prayers and sincere repentance cannot bring to pass. What we have told, we have told, and it has gone from our keeping. LITTLE PROBLEMS OF MARRIED LIFE. 993 This is the cyclonic confession, understandable, and even forgivable, perhaps as a cloudburst; but there is a mean drizzle of complaint, a constant fog of petty charges, that is one of the worst phases of talking home matters outside. When a husband adopts the martyr pose and talks freely of all the things he has to put up with at home, interposing sample home conversations and incidents, one longs to take him into a corner, remove this "Dead March in Saul" cylinder from the phonograph of his conversation and put in a "Home Sweet Home" one. When a wife feels that every one must be interested in her story of her difficulties in divorcing her husband from a little money for household expenses, and continuously encores herself with similar narratives in her repertoire, one cannot but feel, somehow, a good deal of sympathy — with the husband. If the horse-power energy that married people thus put into syndicating their trials, sorrows and troubles were concentrated on trying to lessen the cause; on seeking, through love, to discover a way out ; through mutual esteem to reach a truer basis of understanding and harmony, they would accomplish wonders and would realize that the larger part of their suffering is cruelly wrong because — preventable. Advertising it to the world publishes, of course, the competition, but does not bring a solution. They should some time stand reverently for a while before one of those modern engines that consume their own smoke, and then heed the moral of this sermon in mechanism. Confidences on vital home matters are dangerous in proportion to their importance ; they imply so much that they should be entrusted, if at all, only perhaps to one or two, whose tested love, honor and loyalty make doubt seem sacrilege. There are friends of the mind, friends of the heart and friends of the soul. It is with the last only that we have assurance and certainty that open ears will ever be associated with closed lips, that any message committed to them is stored in the holy of holies of memory, where speech can never reach it to reveal it. In life, usually, the only absolute, incontestable insurance of a secret is to tell it to no one. If one does not want a fact known it is wise not to tell any part of it. Partial confidences are dangerous, because in time the separate pieces retained in the memory of the listener may be carefully put together, like the irregu- 994 IMl'ROVEMENT ERA. lar sections of a dissected map. Sometimes a word, a suggestion, an inadvertent phrase, meaningless in itself, vitalizes unnoted trifles of old memories, which suddenly combine and stand out, vivid and luminous in a moment as a complete revelation, such as the speaker never intended to give. There are sometimes exclamations that are life-revelations in a word, autobiographic confessions in an unguarded phrase. Sometimes in the desire for sympathy or advice, one is tempted to tell a home problem impersonally, or rather in the third person, as the life-experience of some dear friend, with a hazardous confidence in the safety of the alibi; but the turning of a phrase, a sudden tension of emotion, a feverish note of protest or plea may tend to puncture the frail bubble of deception. The vicarious sympathy may be forthcoming, but it hardly pays for the risk. The advice under such circumstances is valueless, because it is not based on the absolute knowledge of every detail requisite for true judgment and counsel really beneficial to the one asking advice and help in some individual crisis. Circumstances, personality and character are so interrelated that it is difficult, impossible, indeed, for one human being to give an opinion on the merits of a question affecting two others when he knows really little about them. Such advice might well be not only worthless, but harmful. Far better is it to deny even this indulgence to oneself — for, after all, it is only an indulgence. There is unwisdom in talking too freely even of happiness in married life outside the home walls. It may give a new touch of pain to one struggling with a serious heart problem and unable to see a way out. It may be a tax on the courtesy and patience of those who cannot be expected to feel a deep personal interest in the vaunted joys of another. Often in the swift current of speech one may speak of some little domestic episode that should be held too sacred for the ears of others. What may be sweet and dear, in the words and acts of either, may seem but silly sentimentality when translated by unsympathetic minds and repeated with variations by wantonly wagging tongues. Should there be any drop in the value of the home stock and one no longer tells of the pearls of happiness, the very silence will be construed as a confession and may bring a trail of humiliation, or criticism and gossip. It may entail lying and hypocrisy LITTLE PROBLEMS OF MARRIED LIFE. 995 to sustain the old record. There are knowing ones, too, who feel that effusive protestations and proclamations of matrimonial joy, when not merely silly and undignified, may be untrue. "The lady doth protest too much, methinks" is the shrewd Shakespearean phrase that comes to their mind. The sober man does not proclaim his sobriety on the midnight highway ; it is the zigzagging pedestrian who wishes his speech to be believed instead of his walk. True happiness rarely boasts ; it radiates. If it really exist the little world that cares at all, the few who have real heart interest in the two, will read it in the eyes more truly than from the lips, more in the voice than in the words. It will glow and pervade an atmosphere of sweetness, trust, peace and comradeship, manifesting itself in a hundred little ways that tell the story without words as a rose reveals its presence through its perfume, the sun the light and warmth it radiates. True happiness need not advertise ; it has merely to exist to make itself felt. When the home problems assume the acute phase when confidence somewhere seems compelling, then let husband and wife confide more closely in each other, realizing that their problem must first be tried by this council of two, if it is really to be solved at all. In the sweet, honest, full, frank interchange of views, seeking, not the blame of either, but the happiness of both ; letting no personal pettiness or false sense of momentary triumph eclipse the looked-for justice, and feeling that, for the time, the great struggling, busy world outside is too microscopically small to be worthy of a thought, when weighed in the balance of their united happiness — their happiness in union and unity — then, in a spirit, and only in such a one, great things become possible. It is this spirit of the finality of the two, love recognizing no higher court of appeal in the world around them, that holds the ideal of married life so high that it would seem the desecrating hand of an outsider touching the ark of the covenant of their love even to think of talking these matters over outside the sacred walls of home. ["The Danger of Growing Apart Mentally," will be discussed in the next chapter of this series.] T