Part 15

Apparently, however, it never occurs to a man that there is the slightest necessity to make any effort to keep his wife fascinated and to prevent her eyes from roaming around in search of a sheik. He may be bay-windowed and bald, but if he reduces it is only on his doctor’s orders, and not because he wants to look boyish to his wife. And he never buys a toupee until after he becomes a widower and begins to take notice again. The idea that his wife might cease to love him actually never crosses the average man’s mind. He is convinced that she couldn’t do it. It is some peculiarity of the feminine constitution that makes a woman go on loving what has become unlovable. Now, with a man it is different, of course. He realizes that he couldn’t stay very long in love with a woman who was slouchy, and sloppy, and untidy looking, who came to breakfast in a dirty kimono and run down at the heel slippers. Nor would he take much interest in kissing a cheek smeared with cold cream.

But he doesn’t see why his wife shouldn’t still regard him as a romantic figure when he goes around in a soiled shirt and a rumpled collar, with grease spots on his coat and trousers that bag at the knees, and offers to her lips a countenance with a two days’ stubble of beard on it.

A man knows well enough that, as far as he is concerned, the only way to keep the love fires burning is to keep piling the fuel on it and pouring over it the oil of flattery and praise. But he thinks that you don’t have to put any more fuel on the fire of a woman’s heart, because it is a flame that miraculously replenishes itself. So after he marries he never bothers to show her any attention, or to pay her any compliments, or to tell her that he loves her, or give any indication that he regards her as anything but a piece of useful household furniture. If any woman ever treated him that way his affection would mighty soon starve to death, but he never has the slightest apprehension that his wife’s love will perish on the same meager rations.

There are men who abuse their wives, who swear at them, and curse them, and speak to them as if they were dogs. There are men whose wives live in trembling fear of their tempers. There are men who are stingy and who do not give to their wives, who spend their lives slaving for them, the poorest wage of an ill-paid servant. Yet these men go on believing that their wives still love them because they loved them in the days of courtship, when they were handsome, gallant, and neat, and attractive, and loving, and flattering, and generous, and considerate swains.

Such men befool themselves by thinking that they cannot kill a woman’s love. Never was there a greater mistake. A woman’s love is as delicate and as fragile a thing as a flower that you can crush with a finger. And it takes never-ending skill, and care, and cherishing to keep it alive. You can kill it with disgust. You can kill it with unkindness. You can kill it with injustice. You can kill it with neglect, and it would surprise many a man who still believes that his wife loves him in spite of the way he has treated her, in spite of his indifference to her, to know that her love for him has been dead so long that she has almost forgotten that she ever cared for him at all.

So I warn you, Mr. Man, not to put any faith in the theory that you can’t kill a woman’s love. Women are like men; they only love the lovable. And if you wish to retain your wife’s affections, you have got to continue after marriage the same tactics you used in winning her.

XLVIII

THE LURE OF THE MARRIED MAN

A man wants to know why married men have such a fascination for girls, and wherein a benedict’s wooing differs from that of a bachelor. The first part of this double-barreled question was answered by Eve in the Garden of Eden, and every girl takes after her greatest grandmother. Married men are forbidden fruit, and that alone whets the appetite of the foolish little Evelyns for them, and makes them seem the prize pippins of the whole matrimonial orchard. The thing that a woman cannot have, that she has no right to have, and especially the thing that some other woman possesses, is always the thing that she wants most. If you have ever watched women fight over a commonplace and unattractive article on a bargain table, where each was determined to have it just because the others desired it, you have the psychological explanation of why a girl falls for a married man that she wouldn’t look at if he were single.

Also, women are the adventurous sex. They love to play with danger as a child plays with fire, and a large part of the lure of the married man consists in the fact that a girl knows that when she has an affair with one, she is risking every shred of her reputation, and gambling with her happiness, and that any minute she may be cited as a corespondent, and dragged into the slime of the divorce courts.

Also, the average girl is simply slopping over with romance, and somehow she gets more kick out of being wooed under the rose than she does in an above board, honest-to-God courtship. There is something about the secrecy of a love intrigue with a married man, about the surreptitious letters, about the stolen rendezvous, that thrills her to the core of her being. It makes her feel so desperately wicked, like one of the grand passion heroines of her favorite novels, who cried “All for love, and the world well lost” as she chucked her bonnet over the windmill.

It is because the married man is the only man in the world who is out of her reach, and whom she has no right to try to grab; it is because some other woman has set her seal of approval on him by marrying him; it is because an illicit love episode is a streak of lurid romance in her drab days, that the little Totties and Flossies are able to see the hero of their girlish dreams in the fat, bald-headed, middle-aged men for whom they work, and the Mauds and Gwendolyns imagine that they have found their affinities in some ordinary commonplace married man, who would bore them to tears if his wedding ring had not given him a fictitious value in their eyes.

Add to this, vanity and cruelty. In the man hunt, women look on the married man as big game, and when they bring one down they feel as if they had captured an elephant instead of having shot a tame rabbit. There are girls who boast of their conquests among married men, and who have so little heart that they delight in watching the agonies of jealousy that they inflict on the poor defenseless wife. Many young women are likewise gold-diggers, and these virtually confine their attentions to married men, as wealthy bachelors are few and well-to-do middle-aged married men are plentiful and easy.

Why the married man who starts out as a Lothario is an easy winner of feminine hearts is perfectly obvious. To begin with, he has the same advantage that the widower has over the single man. He is a professional, so to speak, instead of an amateur lover. He has the education in women that only marriage can give a man, for he has had a wife and, like the wise man of Kipling’s poem, he “learned about women from her.” He has found out that all women are so hungry for love that they will swallow any soft talk without examining its quality. He has found out that you can jolly a woman into anything. He has found out that women melt down into a mush that you can do with as you will, under a little understanding and sympathy. He has found out that if you remember an anniversary, and a woman’s taste in two or three things, she will believe it an absolute proof of undying devotion.

The married man knows that there is one sure short cut to virtually every woman’s heart. It is pity. And so he begins his love-making by telling the girl that his wife does not understand him, that she is not his real soul-mate, that they have nothing in common, and that his home is bleak, and barren, and unhappy. Generally he accuses his wife of being a human iceberg, while he is a perfect geyser of love and tenderness. And then he moans: “Oh, why did we not meet in time?” And the poor little idiot of a girl undertakes the consolation rôle.

Of course, all of this effective love play is more or less impossible to the bachelor. He lacks the technique of the married man. He cannot appeal to a woman’s sympathies, or pose before her in the rôle of a martyr. He can only make love in the commonplace old way, and it cramps his style. But the real reason that the married man is a devil among women is just the same old reason that made Eve listen to the serpent.

XLIX

FORGET IT

Every day some girl writes me that she is young, quite as pretty as the other girls about her, that she dresses as well, and makes as good an appearance as they do, and strives to please, but that no man ever pays her the slightest attention, or asks her to step out with him of an evening. Then this girl goes on to say that she is a business girl, but she doesn’t make a very good salary, and she is discouraged, and blue, and wants to know what to do.

My advice to a girl in this situation—and there are millions of her—is to forget men. Give up the struggle to attract them. Quit trying to catch one. Renounce romance. Throw away all thoughts of marriage. Just accept the fact that nature did not put you in the vamp class, and play your game of life from that angle.

This counsel will be a bitter pill for the girl to swallow, but she will find it good medicine that will work a speedy and permanent cure, if she will try it on herself. Why certain women are magnets that draw every man they meet to them, and why nothing in trousers except upon compulsion ever goes near other women just as good looking, just as charming in every way, is one of the mysteries nobody has ever solved. Nor has anyone ever been able to suggest a remedy for this state of affairs.

The fast steamship, the lightning express, the aeroplane, have annihilated distance, but human ingenuity has failed to invent any device to make a boy go to see the girl next door if he doesn’t want to go. Science has torn its secrets from the earth, but it cannot find out what quality it is in woman that attracts men. It has invented chemicals that work magic in the physical world, but it has never discovered a reliable love philter.

So that’s that. And it is a wise girl who has the courage to look herself in the face, and see whether she has the “come hither” look in her eye, and if she hasn’t, to recognize the fact, and devote herself to a more promising occupation than chasing men, who, in the end, always make their getaway, unless they desire to be caught.

Therefore, I would urge the girl who does not make a spontaneous hit with men, to quit wasting her time and her energies in the vain attempt to decoy them into noticing her, and to put all that lost motion and force into her work, where she will get better results.

Believe me, if the girl who does not attract men, tried as hard to sell herself to her job as she does to sell herself socially, she would not have to complain long of holding a small position. She would be a highly paid secretary, or buyer, or department manager.

If the girl who does not attract men, studied her employer’s moods and tenses as earnestly as she does those of some little jellybean, and if she was as anxious to please her employer as she is to please the jazz hounds and cakeaters she meets, she would find herself one of the valued employees who are always spoken of reverentially as “our Miss So-and so.”

If the girl who never has a date would put in one hundredth part of the intensive study on her work that she gives to the technique of the popular girl, and to trying to find out something about the psychology of customers or the history of the goods she handles, or the details of the business she is employed in, she would have employers fighting over her.

In a word, if the girl who is not popular with men would concentrate her thoughts, her interests, and her ambitions, on getting ahead in the occupation she has chosen, instead of wasting her time and energies in a fruitless attempt to charm men, she would be a success instead of a failure; she would be happy instead of miserable.

As it is now she falls between the stools. She is a poor makeshift in her job, who gets nowhere, because her one desire, her one ambition, her one aim in life is to attract men and catch a husband, and she is miserable, and discouraged, and bitter, and disgruntled, because she is balked in that attempt. And she is a siren without allure who never arrives at the altar, so she fails both as a business woman, and in her effort to catch a husband.

This is a great pity, because while love and marriage are highly desirable blessings to come into a woman’s life, they are not the whole of life. The world is full of such a lot of things besides sentiment. There is independence, the freedom to come and go as one pleases. There is the exhilarating sport of climbing up the ladder of success, which has a million thrills for every round. There is the solid satisfaction of achievement. There is the good job that keeps one on one’s tiptoes so that one never has a dull moment. There is the happiness that comes of being employed in constructive work. There is one’s own home, with one’s own pots, and pans, and doilies, if one wants them.

Take it from me, girls, the woman who espouses a career does not get the worst husband there is. She has a life companion from whom she never has to wheedle the pennies. She never has to listen to any back talk or criticisms. She is never afraid of this companion getting tired and running off after flappers. It is only the lucky women, who make exceptional marriages, who are as well off as the business girls who do not marry.

Furthermore, there is this comfort to be given the girl who quits trying to attract men, and gets busy with her job. Men are contrary creatures. Pursue them, and they flee from you. Lay traps, and they walk wide of them. But let them alone, indicate that you are indifferent to them; that you are concerned with your own affairs in which they have no part; let them realize that you can get on quite well without them, and it piques their interest. They come flocking around of their own accord to see what manner of woman you are.

Also the girl who makes something of herself, and who rises high in her profession is thrown with the men at the top, the men of brains, and they are often attracted to her while the silly little boys with whom she used to play about were not.

So I say again to the girls who are not attractive to men, stop wasting your time in the useless attempt to vamp men. Put your heart and your soul into your job. Work is the consolation prize God gives us when we miss getting the thing we wanted most.

L

LOST LOVE

Many women ask me how they can regain the love of some man which they have lost. Sometimes, a girl tells me, weeping, of a once ardent lover who has become cold and neglectful, who no longer comes to see her, and she wants to know how to bring him back, and make him once more crazy about her.

Oftenest, however, it is a wife who seeks desperately for some magic whereby she can light again the love fires in the heart of a husband who has ceased to care for her, who is tired of her, and who does not even take the trouble to hide from her the fact that he regards her as a burden, of which he would rid himself if he could.

It is the tragedy of these women that they are doomed to love men after the men no longer love them. Not even neglect, and insult, and faithlessness, kill their affection for those on whom they have set their foolish, doglike hearts. So they cling with desperate hands to the men who are trying to break away from them, hoping against hope, praying some miracle will happen that will give them back their lost love.

But their prayers are never answered. The miracle never happens. No sorcerer can teach a woman how to weave a spell a second time about a man. The love potions that the credulous buy from fortune tellers, never work, and though a woman conjure never so deftly, she cannot bring back the heart that has slipped out of her keeping.

For of all dead things, nothing is so dead as dead love. No power can breathe into it again the breath of life, and make it a vital thing once more.

We do not know why we love. We do not know why some particular man or woman makes a peculiar appeal that makes us prefer him or her to all the other men and women in the world. We do not know why the touch of certain hands thrill us; why the quirk of a smile, or the look in an eye, draws us; why we have a sense of comradeship with certain individuals; why some man or woman fascinates us; or why we desire one man or woman more than another, who may be better looking, more intelligent, more worthy in every way.

Nor do we any more know why we cease to love than we know why we love. We do not know why the touch of the hand that has thrilled us ceases to thrill; nor why the charm that was once so potent vanishes into thin air, nor why the fascination flees, and the one who once held us enthralled becomes a bore who wearies us to tears. It just happens, and we are as helpless before one situation as before the other.

There are not many men who are cruel enough to find sport in breaking a woman’s heart, and who deliberately win a girl’s love, and play with it, and fling it away. There are not many husbands who would not remain their wives’ eternal lovers, if it was in their power to control their affections. That was their romantic dream when they married. That way their happiness lay, and they would have kept their romance had it been a matter of their own volition.

Unfortunately, the disillusion came. The glory and the circling wings departed. Somehow their wives lost their allure for them, and strive as they might, they could not see them again with the eyes of a lover, or bring back their charm. Many a man would be just as glad to fall in love again with his wife as she would be to have him fall in love with her once more, but he cannot do it. You cannot fan dead ashes into a flame.

Perhaps if wives realized how impossible it is to resurrect a dead love, they would guard the living love more carefully, and run fewer risks of killing it. They would not take the chance of disillusioning their husbands by going about sloppy and slovenly at home, and thus presenting a fatal contrast to the trimly dressed women in their offices, and the beautified ladies they meet in society. They would reflect that no man would have much appetite for domestic kisses when flavored with cold cream, and that if a wife wishes to be regarded as a ladylove, she must look the part instead of resembling a sack of potatoes.

And they would see to it that love is not assassinated on their hearthstones by ceaseless, senseless quarrels, by whining, and complaining, and nagging, and petty tyrannies. Nor would they permit love to die of that commonest and most deadly ailment, boredom. For if a woman can interest her husband enough before marriage to make him pick her out from all the rest of the world for his life partner, she can interest him enough to hold him until the end of the chapter if she is willing to take the trouble and perform the labor necessary to do so.

If, though, a woman, through carelessness or ignorance, has lost the love of the man she loves, there is absolutely no way in which she can win it back. Through duty or a sense of honor she may hold his body, but his soul has gone from her forever, and she is wise if she accepts the inevitable.

If she is a girl, she should let the sweetheart who is tired of her go, instead of trying to hold him. Some other man she may make love her, but not the old one for whom she has lost her charm.

If she is a married woman whose husband has ceased to love her, let her agonize no more over the impossible task of reviving his passion for her. Let her fill her life with other interests and thank God that there are so many other pleasant things in the world besides love.

For of this she may rest assured. There is no reviving of dead love. When once we have lost our taste for a person everything is over. It is finished, as the French say.

LI

THE SHOW WEDDING

The Turks have passed a law prohibiting elaborate and costly marriage ceremonials, and forbidding the giving of expensive wedding presents. What a pity that we cannot have such an edict issued in this country! For there is no other one thing that would do more to allay heartburnings and jealousies, prevent nervous prostration and bankruptcy, and promote peace and thrift than to officially “can” the show wedding.