MEN WHO SHOULD NOT MARRY.
Not long since a writer in the New York Times gave a list of men who should not marry. We copy out of that list and comments thereon the following, from the Pacific Ensign, with the suggestion, brother, that if the truth strikes too close home, there is grace in Christ to effect a reformation. The man who talks about “supporting” a wife when she is working fourteen hours a day, including Sundays. The man who thinks his wife exists for the comfort and convenience of his mother and his sisters. The man who provides himself with a family and trusts Providence to provide the family with a home and something to eat. The man who thinks that women are angels. The man who thinks that nobody but an angel is good enough to be his wife. The man who thinks a woman ought to give up a thousand-dollar salary and work in his kitchen for her board and a few clothes, and be glad of the chance. The man who thinks a five-year-old worsted street gown is the proper sort of toilet for a dinner party or a reception. The man who labors under the delusion that his wife’s money belongs to him. The man who thinks a parlor carpet ought to last fifteen years. The man who has seventy-five dollars worth of fishing tackle and can’t afford a new set of curtains for the dining-room. The man who always leaves his wife at home when he takes his summer vacation. The man who doesn’t know what on earth a woman wants with money when she has a bill at the dry goods store. The man who thinks a sick wife would feel better if she would “just get up and stir around.” The man who forgets his manners as soon as he crosses his own threshold. The man who thinks he can keep house better than his wife does. The man who thinks it is “all nonsense” for a woman to want a ten-cent bunch of pansies or violets, when she hasn’t seen a flower for five months. The man who thinks a woman’s bonnet ought to cost about seventy-five cents. The man who thinks there is “no place like home”—for grumbling and growling. If the man who considers a bunch of flowers a useless extravagance will contrive to marry a woman who does not care for flowers, there will be no marital trouble on that score. If the man who objects to paying milliners’ bills will select a woman who knows how to make her hats, they may live in peace all their lives; and so on through the whole list. But the chances are that the sensitive, beauty-loving woman falls a prey to the coarse, unesthetic man, and inevitably that marriage becomes sooner or later a failure. The intellectual woman is thrown into the hands of the man who is marrying just to get a maid of all work, and divorce or separation becomes more than a remote possibility. Conversely, the frivolous society woman makes a victim of the earnest, home-loving man; the slovenly, careless woman, who can not keep house, manages to attract a man who loves cleanliness, beauty, and order in all things, and happiness is never found at that hearthstone. All that misery could easily be avoided. “How long have you known your husband?” asked one woman of another. “Twelve years,” was the reply. “Why, I thought you were engaged for several years before your marriage.” “So I was,” said the married woman with a sigh, “but I never knew John till I got married to him.” No matter how long the courtship, people generally are total strangers to each other when they stand up before a minister and promise to live together as husband and wife until death parts them. They have discussed Shakespeare and Browning, and if married life were a Shakespeare club or a Browning society, all would be well with them. But he has a certain ideal of wifehood and home life, and of this ideal she is as ignorant as she is of Sanskrit or Hottentot. She, too, has her idea of what a husband and a home should be, but she never talks to her betrothed on such commonplace themes as this. They take the leap in the dark at a flower-decked altar, and in nine cases out of ten add another figure to the sum total of unhappy marriages. Everybody has two personalities: One is an elegant cultured individual of easy manner and amiable speech, who discusses poetry and philosophy in the drawing-room; the other is a plain, ordinary man or woman, full of whims, and fancies, and habits. There should be some legal or social writ of habeas corpus or summons that would bring this hidden self to light during the days of courtship. It would be an uncanny intrusion, but the number of inharmonious marriages would be immensely reduced.