The Southern Enterprise

Friendships of Wives and Husbands.

It is fitting, in the next place, to say something of the disappointment and wretchedness which so many married men and women notoriously experience in their relations with each other. It may be useful to state the principal causes of this unhappiness, and to give some definite directions in the way of remedy. Absence of love, absence of reason, absence of justice, absence of taste--in other words, harshness and neglect, silliness and frivolity, vice and crime, vulgarity and slovenliness--are the leading and inevitable creators of alienation, dislike and misery in marriage. Whatever tends to increase these tends to multiply separations and divorces between those who cannot endure each other; and to multiply irritations, quarrels, sorrows and agonies between those who may endure but cannot enjoy each other. In marriage the intimacy is so great and constant that the slightest friction easily becomes galling. Nowhere beside is there such need of magnanimous forbearance in one, or else of equality of worth and refinement in both. "Love does not secure happiness in marriage--often the contrary: reason is necessary." So said the wise Jean Paul. He also said: "The best man joined with the worst woman has a greater hell than the best woman joined with the worst man." This is no doubt true as a general rule, because woman is so much more capable than man of self-abnegation, silent patience, meek submission and flexible adjustment to inevitable circumstances. Probably the women who keenly and chronically suffer from unhappy marriages are far more numerous than the kindred sufferers of the other sex. This is because they are more deeply susceptible to cruelty and indifference and to all the repulsive traits of character: are less capable of ignoring such things; have less of absorbing occupation of their own to take up their attention, and are less able to be absorbed in things beyond the personal and domestic sphere. There are unquestionably thousands of married women whose experience is made a living martyrdom by the infidelity, the tyranny, the coarseness: the general odiousness and wearisomeness of their husbands. In most cases, even where a divorce is wished, the shocking public scandal and disgrace are too much; and they wear on to the end. What misery delicate and conscientious women, of dedicated souls and polished manners, who love everything that is pure and beautiful, are compelled to undergo in their bondage to husbands, ignorant, uninteresting, ignoble relentlessly domineering, is not to be expressed. Their best weapons, in such cases, if they knew it, are gentleness, patience, persuasion, and the skillful use of every means to improve and uplift their unequal companions to their own level. The Persian poet expressed a rich truth when he wrote, "Gentleness is the salt on the table of morals" --It is a tragedy that the good wife of a bad husband is so identified with him that the penalties of his offences fall on her head, often more terribly than on his. A pure woman loving a wicked man must expect to have her affections ravaged by his sins; does not the lightning drawn by the rod blast the innocent ivy entwining it? What lacerating woes the gambler, the drunkard, the forger, the adulterer, inflicts on his wife!

And yet, profound as is the misfortune, sharp as is the suffering of such, it may be doubted whether a noble, sensitive, cultivated man, with a yearning heart of softness and peace, a capacious mind full of grand aspirations, married, by some fatal chance, to a woman with a petty soul, a teasing and tyrannical temper, a mendacious and railing tongue, whose taste is for small gossip and scandal, whose ambition is for fashionable show and noise, whose life is one incessant fret and sting--it may be doubted if this man's lot is not severer with his ill-matched consort than hers would be with the worst husband in the world. He had better marry a vinegar cruet than such a Tartar. When weary and seeking to rest, to be roused up by a scolding; when, searching for truth, or contemplating beauty, or communing with God, or aspiring to perfection, or scheming some vast good for mankind, to be aggravated by abuse, insulted by false charges, dragged down to petty interests which he despises, and mixed up with wrongs and passions which he loathes--there degrading injuries, these wasteful vexations, are what he must endure. No wonder if he vehemently resents a treatment so incongruous with his worth. No wonder if, vexed, hurt, goaded half to madness, he gets enraged, and unseemly contentions ensue, followed by painful depression and remorseful grief. No wonder if he finds it hard indeed to forget or to forgive the infliction of an evil so incomparably profound and frightful. There is, to a high-souled man, no wrong more hurtful or more difficult to pardon than to have mean motives falsely ascribed to him, to be placed by misinterpretation on a lower plane than that where he belongs. Every such experience stabs the moral source of life, and draws blood from the soul itself. Husband and wife powerfully tend to a common level and likeness. The higher must redeem and lift the unequal mate, or live in strife and misery. If the lower takes pattern after the superior one, the petty, frivolous, false, and fretful becoming magnanimous, dedicated, truthful, and serene, it is a divine triumph of grace, and the result will be full of blessedness. But otherwise a wearing unhappiness is inevitable, however carefully it be hidden, however bravely it be borne.-- From the "Friendships of Women," by Alger.