A BOY FOR A HUSBAND

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 26, 1900

A BOY FOR A HUSBAND.

Ladies’ Home Journal.

WHEN the American girl defers her choice of a husband until she has had a reasonable opportunity to see something of mankind, and had a chance to compare the good with the bad, she is pretty apt to strike a good average for herself. As a rule, she is a pretty good judge of men, when she gives her judgment time to assist her to a wise conclusion. The point is to get her to wait. It must be said to her credit that she is waiting longer than she did formerly. It is not so many years ago that a girl was considered of a marriageable age when she became sixteen or seventeen years old. If she married then, or shortly afterward, it was not such an unusual thing. Twenty-five years ago girls generally married at nineteen, while to-day the average is closer to twenty-three. The marriage of a girl in her teens causes actual surprise in these days. Out of a list of one thousand marriages recently compiled, just one half the brides were between twenty-two and twenty-five; two hundred were between twenty-five and thirty. Still, there were three hundred under twenty years of age. And nearly all these young girls married men under twenty-two — mere boys, in other words. And this is the fatal part of a girl’s marriage at too early an age. Instead of choosing a man for her husband, she is very apt to choose a boy.

No young man under twenty-five years of age is in any sense competent to take unto himself a wife. It is a far lesser evil for a girl to marry under twenty than it is for a man to marry before he is twenty-five. Before that age he is simply a boy who has absolutely nothing which he can offer to a girl as a safe foundation for life-happiness. He is unformed in his character, unsettled in his ideas, absolutely ignorant of the first essentials of what consideration or love for a woman means. He doesn’t know himself, let alone knowing a woman. He is full of fancies, and it is his boyish nature to flit from one fancy to another. He is incapable of the affection upon which love is based, because he has not lived long enough to know what the feeling or even the word means. He is full of theories, each one of which, when he comes to put it into practice, will fail. For of such stuff are theories made. He is full of positive opinions, each one of which he will live to see change and be proved wrong. It is not that he is to blame. He is a boy, pure and simple, passing through that trying period through which every boy must pass before he becomes a man. But that period is not the marrying time.

Of course, the boy of twenty, or under twenty-five, will be the first to strongly resent all that I say of him. And this resentment will be based on his belief that he is unlike other young men of his years. He feels, and sometimes expresses the fact, that he is older than his years. And usually that is the excuse which the girl employs in argument when her fancy alights upon a boy of tender years. She will argue, and more often than not, against her own deep conviction, that he knows so much more than other young men of twenty or twenty-two. But, unfortunately for such an argument, there is only one rule to a man’s knowledge. Experience, and experience only, is authority, and this only comes with years. A young man of twenty-two has had just so many years of actual experience. The same number of days are in each man’s years; and while one mind may be quicker to grasp a truth or learn a lesson than another, the real lessons of life are learned only by living a certain number of years. And no young man under twenty-five can by any possibility have opened up within himself those deep wellsprings of experience which are the sources of inspiration to do those little acts of wise self-restraint, of subtle consideration, which make or mar a woman’s happiness in the marriage state.

It is my privilege to know well, and in many instances I have been allowed to come very near to, scores of young men who are now between twenty and twenty-five years of age. Many of them are promising young fellows — far above what we call the average. They are strong, sensible, manly young fellows — precisely the kind of whom girls are apt to say that they are older than their years. But, as a man, I give my honest word to any young girl who may read these words, that into the hands of not a single one of these bright, strong young fellows would I voluntarily place the future happiness of a sister of mine. It isn’t that they are not excellent young fellows. They are, and most excellent. They never talk to me of life, however, as they see it, but I realize how helpless they would be as husbands, how absolutely lacking in the possession of that strong and safe sense of guidance and confidence which a man must give to the woman who is his wife, and for the exercise of which qualities there arise so many little occasions in a wife’s life. Let these young men live five or ten years more, and they will in all probability have come into the possession of these qualities, and they will then make worthy husbands.

No girl can afford, either for her own surest happiness, or for the comfort of mind of him whom she marries, to wed a young man during the formative period of his life, which is between twenty and twenty-five. During that time he is apt to learn some hard lessons, which it is best he should learn alone. He should learn them before he takes up the responsibility of the care and well-being of another. A young man can hardly get too much good common sense knocked into his head before he undertakes the care of a young girl who in her father’s house has known naught but the tender solicitude of wisdom born of experience and mature years. Even at twenty-five he is at a disadvantage in comparison with the greater experience of the father from whose care he takes the girl. But at least the disadvantage is not so decided. It is not so great as it was when he was younger. And a girl who withholds from a young man her consent to marriage until he has reached the first year of the beginning of wisdom is a sensible little body, and acts in a manner that she will never have cause to regret as long as God gives her and her husband life.

There is a keen side, a sad and pathetic side, to the boy-husband which hundreds of girls do not stop to realize nor think about. For instance, no loving wife wishes to see her husband passed by or go unnoticed by other men. She is anxious that her husband shall have the respect and confidence of men. It gives her a keen sense of humiliation when he fails of either. Yet such is the inevitable experience that must come to the young wife. She may see her husband win respect, but it will be the respect that a man gives to a boy. This will disappoint and anger her. Still, it is all that men can mete out to him.

Men who know the world know how little confidence they can repose in a boy under twenty-five, no matter what may be his mental capacity, or have been his opportunities. They know, even if the girl has refused to recognize it, that a man knows thoroughly only what he has experienced. And to their minds it takes more than the first twenty-five years of life to have that experience and be equipped with that clearness of mind and sound judgment which command confidence. These things the young girl who rushes headlong into marriage with a boy must not forget. She will find, unfortunately, that the world will not let her forget them after she is a wife. It would be infinitely better for her and for the young man of her fancy if she realized this before marriage. It would save them both an infinite amount of disappointment. Not that the world is hard. But it expects certain things from a young man who takes unto himself a wife. And one of the things which it expects and demands of him is that he shall know what he is about, which he can not know, so far as marriage is concerned, when he is under twenty-five years of age.

And so, while the number of girls who marry boys is growing perceptibly less each year, the percentage who still make the fatal mistake should ponder well on the step they take. A girl’s future life is a most precious thing, and it ought to be more precious to her than to any one else. The happiness of a lifetime is a serious thing with which to take any chances. A mistake made here will often come back to her, and bring pangs to which no other human suffering is comparable; it is about as close to a living death as a woman can come. All this disappointment and suffering is easy enough to avoid if our girls will only believe the one potent fact,— that until a young man reaches the age of twenty-five, he is absolutely incapable of intelligently receiving into his keeping the care and support of any girl. The least a girl can do when she does marry is to marry a man, and not a boy.