Deference Between Husband and Wife
By Harriet P. Spofford
THE man who, after a rude remark to a lady, begged her pardon, saying he had thought it was his wife, was of the kind very apt to be agreeable when outdoors, and disagreeable when at home, the man who not only has never profited by the old fable of the sun and the north wind, who has failed to perceive that courtesy is the flower of civilization and the essence of Christianity, but who has never learned that in the long run it is a good-paying investment. No man can hope to retain his wife’s affection, if she is much of a woman, who constantly offends her sense of propriety and outrages her feelings by his rudeness. She looks with envy at the woman whose husband listens with the appearance of pleasant interest when she speaks, sees always that she is well served, taps on her bedroom door before he enters, by his own deference obliges that of others; and in the absence of courtesy, and its visible evidence of appreciation, she ends by dethroning the demigod that every woman’s husband is to her in the beginning, holding in his place an ideal with small resemblance to himself as the thing she would have liked for the guardian of her home, always a little saddened by realization of the impossibility of its actual existence, and inevitably regarding her husband from a plane of personal superiority. A corresponding disregard for her best happiness is shown by the woman who allows herself to treat her husband with disrespect, who breaks in upon his remarks, directs upon him her ridicule, points out his deficiencies, and complains of him to others. That woman’s husband, after a while, must feel a deadening of sensibility so far as she is concerned; she may have a partner, she no longer has a lover. And, meanwhile, she has lowered her own standard; for, after all, it is her husband; and if it is not true that as the husband is, the wife is, nevertheless the wife takes her rank from and through him; and if he is so poor a thing, moreover, it is supposedly the most in the way of husbands that she could attain. Manners, said Aristotle, are the lesser morals; and to one who searches there is a moral and a reason behind every principle of their code. The offender against their code is considered a boor because he breaks down that which refines and sweetens life, and nowhere is this code so vital as in the intimate relations of the married, where it stands forever in the way of that rough familiarity which breeds contempt. There are individuals who have the singular notion that attention to the minute matters of politeness in general is a confession of inferiority, and that, as between husband and wife, it is a silly superfluity. A man is afraid of being thought uxorious; a wife is afraid of seeming afraid; each thinks a certain carelessness, a certain roughness and brusquerie, the desirable method in public, leaving one to infer how much worse the want of courtesy may be in private. Why it should discredit a man to show, so far as a sufficiently gentle and deferential manner does it, that his wife is of more importance to him than all the rest of the world is, or why a woman should think her acquaintances would esteem her less on seeing that she looks up to her husband, regards him as the last and greatest work of creation should be regarded,—as they every one of them either regard their own, or wish they did,—will always be a mystery. For, in point of fact, the more either asserts the other’s dignity, gracefully and naturally, and as without effort, the greater proportions that dignity assumes, while really each is honored in honoring the other, and each is happier. For the rest, the home where delicate manners between the husband and wife are neglected is almost always a scene of strife and vulgar bickering, with partisan feeling. This child resents the careless or flippant indifference on one side; that child resents the bullying on the other; and union and harmony become unknown quantities. But the home where a fine courtesy prevails, where the husband entreats the wife as he would the first lady in the land, and compasses her with sweet observances and sympathetic care, where the wife never fails with the gentle word, the answering smile, the foreseeing thoughtfulness, the compelling respect, is a home where, if love did not exist beforehand, he would come to make his nest and abide continually.—Harriet P. Spofford.