Part 2
Woman is no longer forbidden an education. Elementary education is generally hers, required by law; she may have a college training, or its equivalent; and, in general, in life thereafter, if left with time on her hands at home, she is more literate, in the world of books and ideas, than the man; although she may have had less personal contact with large groups of minds, such as a man encounters in his business and social connections. The balance, for the ideal mating, should swing closer. A woman is the gainer by practical experience at working, so that she may realize from the standpoint of the earner the value of a dollar, and not measure it merely from the standpoint of the spender.
A man once locked his business cares up when he left the office, and never brought them home; or, if he brought them home, brought them merely as complaints, unintelligible to his wife. The ideal mating is where the man and woman are equally interested and intelligent in the business welfare, and are, in effect, partners, as they must be in results. This state can rarely be entirely reached. But if, during the courtship, the girl turns out to be a chatter-tongued and scatter-brained little fool, this is a danger signal to the man, to get out while the getting is good. The girl who raves over the movies, dances like a feather, and thinks like one, is not likely to be a fit mate or mother to the man’s children. The man who turns out to be merely a would-be sheik, with no ideas above professional baseball or spending all he has made in a week in one night, is hardly to be chosen as a permanent mate. Unless such a pair woo and win each other: which makes two other people happy, who might have won these lemons and been unhappy thereafter. Courtship is the great testing time, to see whether the two concerned are congenial mentally, and whether they apparently have similar capacities of mental growth.
_Social Mates._--Should a girl marry only a man well able to support her? Should a man marry only a girl who is well off financially? These questions would be absurd, if current standards of society did not let them largely dictate many of the most unhappy marriages among us. One should marry for love, primarily and almost entirely. The purpose of mating is to increase one’s happiness: love cannot be bought, and the thing called bought love cannot increase happiness. Love in poverty has a harder row to hoe than love in comparative opulence: but love in poverty is immeasurably better than sham love in opulence, which grows soon enough to hatred in opulence. Let physical attractiveness, plus mental congeniality, be the touchstones during the wooing period. The money will somehow come to those who are not utterly spiritual weaklings, and who present a loving and united front to the world. They may never be well off: but they will win more of the goal of mating and life, which is happiness, than well-to-do haters of their mates.
The matter of social position is similar. The chance of happiness in marriage today is not great when all advantages are in favor of the mating parties. When to this is added a distinct difference in social standing, this makes the problem harder of solution. Let this fact, when ascertained, put you on your guard. But, at the same time, it is only one fact among many to be weighed; and, if the physical and mental attractions are strong enough, they should overweigh any inequality in rearing and background.
Of all errors achieved in mating, perhaps marrying to reform a man is the worst. If a man cannot overcome his pet vices during the courting period, when he is free to fight the battle out within himself, it is almost a sure bet he will not alter after marriage. Even if he temporarily ends the faults or vices during the courting, he may slump later. Reforming a man (or a girl either) is a tremendous gamble. If you choose to gamble with your life, and enjoy the risk, that is an excellent reason for going ahead with it. But the more normal human beings will leave reformation to the person concerned, and marry for other and sounder reasons.
_Special Problems._--Should a man be married who has sowed his wild oats? Or should a girl insist upon the man’s coming to the mating pure? Should a girl be married who has sowed her wild oats? Or should a man insist upon her coming to the mating pure?
The average answer is that the man is the gainer by the sowing of wild oats; and that the girl is ruined by the practice. Needless to say, this angle of judgment is all wrong. If the sowing of wild oats consists in mere amorous experience with other women, or in this coupled with drinking, even to the point of moderate drunkenness, and gambling on a scale not too large, the man is not injured for marriage by these. Nor is the girl injured in the slightest. The object of life is to achieve happiness. The chief method of gaining this is by experiencing the world. Love experience is no more harmful (unless pregnancy results) than experience in sampling different food menus. If disease has come, that is a matter for the doctors to pass upon, and the discussion of health above covers it. If the girl has had an illegitimate child, society’s ban is so strong that the case is altered somewhat. This is a factor to be weighed by both parties: it does not of necessity make the girl any the less fit as a mate, than the man would be if he had had an illegitimate child by another woman.
In general, the man is better off for having sowed some wild oats before marriage: he is less liable to plow a field of post-marital wild oats. The same is true, although in a slightly less degree, of the girl. The only difference is caused by the weight of social standards upon the two sexes today.
Should a bashful man or woman woo or be wooed? Bashfulness is in no wise discreditable; it is in general a nervous trait which may be remedied. It comes in general from a want of self-confidence. In general, the bashful continue plugging away in humble self-effacement; and, at times, suddenly burst forth with an achievement far ahead of that of the brassiest individual, self-confident from birth. The cure for bashfulness is contact with crowds, which brings sooner or later the realization that you are not inferior in the slightest to the run of humanity, and are superior to many of your associates. Something of the Coué method--repeating to yourself, without intentional compulsion, “I am important, I believe in myself,” might help. Luckily for the bashful, they ordinarily attract the opposite temperament. If the husband of the bashful woman does not make fun of her peculiarity, but sympathetically brings her out, and if the wife of the bashful man does the same, the effort becomes more than twice as successful. In general, the bashful make mates as satisfactory, or more satisfactory, than the self-confident.
Is love at first sight a possibility? Of course, and a frequent one. The normal man falls in love, at first sight, with every attractive woman he sees. If this is an error, take it as a confession. Many a woman falls in love at first sight with a man who satisfies her ideal, hitherto unrealized. If both feel the emotion simultaneously, we have the perfect case. The subsequent wooing will indicate whether this is enduring love, or an illusion.
Should a man or woman woo several persons at once? In general, especially in the earlier stages of the wooing, this is an advantage. If you wish to buy a jewel, you are wise if you examine several, before making your final choice. The same applies to wooing for a mate. We say at once, because successive wooing permits choice really only of some subsequent love object; whereas the first may be, after all, the most suited. Wooing should be done in honesty; so the element of deception of the parties concerned should not ordinarily be used. This is not because it is ethically wrong, but because, if found out, unpleasant consequences may ensue. But, in general, the wider the choice, the more satisfactory the mating that follows. People who marry the first woman or man they are infatuated with are seldom well mated. Since trial wooings are socially accepted, they should be taken advantage of.
We can now proceed to the technique of wooing.
III
HOW A MAN WOOS
_Whom to Woo._--The first thing to emphasize is that you are wooing the girl, and not her father, her mother, her aunts, or her family in general. Since the objects of the wooing are (1) to learn whether the girl is congenial, and (2) to persuade her that you are congenial, and should be accepted, you will find that the second object is achieved best by making yourself attractive to her. In cases where she cares for the opinion of her mother, or father, or family, it is the part of wisdom to court, within reason, the family as well. But the main thing is to woo the girl.
The girl must be willing to be wooed, sooner or later, or you had best cease your efforts. In normal cases, she will not object from the start. If she objects, because she is interested in someone else, or thinks she does not care to be made love to or to marry, or because she thinks there is some personal reason why you are distasteful, your first task is to continue courteously in your suit, until you test out whether or not you can remove this preliminary bar. If she is interested in some one else, this becomes the old conflict between males for the female’s favor: and you will use the methods indicated hereafter. If she professes to be entirely uninterested in love and mating, unless she is abnormal fundamentally this is easy to overcome. Lay aside your obvious wooing, interest yourself in whatever she is interested in, and qualify as a friend and companion in her own interests. She will soon, if she is normal, recognize the great value of your companionship, and from this love should speedily grow.
If the objection is that she finds some trait in the man that is distasteful to her, this dislike must be overcome. Perhaps the objection is to some mannerism of the man’s, some error of speech, or some habit which may be altered by him. In such cases, if he desires to win the girl’s favor, he must either change the trait, or convince her that she does not really object to it. Of course, her very objection may be an education to the young man, both as to her nature, and as to how others look upon his actions. If, for objection, she objects to his friendship with a certain man, or to his going to baseball games, he may, after studying out the matter, decide that the girl is too narrow in her ideas to be his desired mate. He should, of course, first try to educate her attitude toward an acceptance of his trait; but, if he fails, the world is full of girls, and he may find much more happiness elsewhere. Suppose her objection is to some error of speech that the man constantly commits. In this case, his task is to correct it, not only to please the girl, but because her objection has given him an insight into how other people regard the mistake which he may have always heard made and made himself, without exciting comment.
Six months ago, a girl whom I know met a young man, of good family, fairly well-to-do, fairly educated (a couple of college degrees, I think), and a man who had traveled rather extensively in Europe and South America. He played a good hand of bridge, was interested in the same artistic things that the girl was, and was smitten with her from the first. After playing around with him for a couple of months, she refused to see him thereafter, except in a large party; and absolutely refused to let him court her further. The reason can be gathered from this typical specimen of his conversation. “I was at the club, see? A lot of the fellows were there, see? And we decided to shoot a little bridge, see? On the very first hand, see? I had four honors in diamonds, and I bid two diamonds, see?” Tactfully the girl had pointed out that the constantly reiterated “see” just was not done by literate people. The man could not or would not change it: and yet that small irksome trait was what cost him the girl he wanted.
In more usual cases, however, the girl is willing to be wooed from the start. Then your task is easier.
_Object and Methods of Wooing._--The object of wooing, in addition to its value as education in the opposite sex, is to win the regard of the other person, if you continue to desire her, and to win her consent to the mating. What is the practical method of doing this? The easy and only wholly satisfactory way is to make yourself attractive to the girl, so that you become indispensable to her happiness, her enjoyment of any experience, and her contented living.
Let it be repeated, that the man must stand high in the girl’s eyes, to give the mating a chance for success. If the girl takes a man as a last chance, because she fears she can get no other suitor, the chance for happiness is lessened: if at any time later she meets a more attractive man who persuades her that he would have proposed, if she had waited, regret and dissatisfaction may set in, and the whole love and marriage relationship may be curdled. When a man singles out a girl for his attention, he cannot avoid transplanting the situation back to the old savage days, when the male preened and strutted before the female, anxious for her approval. What are some of the obvious ways to win her approval, which at times are neglected so disastrously that the man’s chances end at once?
Notice the man’s difficult task: to look at himself with the girl’s eyes, and furnish her with an increasingly attractive picture of himself. Some genius uttered the brilliant half truth that love is blind. Luckily for all of us, this is largely true. But a girl’s parents and relatives, friends, and rival suitors, will obligingly lend their eyes as glasses to her: and the man may expect to find what faults he has magnified almost out of recognition. What, then, from the girls’ standpoint, will she look for in the man?
First of all, girls are by nature neater than men. Girls will allow much latitude to a man for carelessness in attire. But the man who neglects such simple toilet matters as the care of his nails, and presents himself with a black rim under them; who lets his shirts and collars remain in service till they are sooty; whose shoes are unnecessarily unpolished, on occasions when she may expect to be judged by other eyes from the standpoint of her escort,--such a neglectful man may as well know that any one of these things may damn him more in the eyes of the girl than if he had committed murder.
Secondly, a girl will judge the man by how she thinks he will look in the eyes of her friends and associates. If the man is slightly ungrammatical, and so are she and her friends, this makes no difference. But, if she has more booklearning than he, and if her friends are critical in this regard, and regard themselves as at all highbrowish, the man must make it his job to grow up to her literate standards. “I don’t like that there show,” “them sort of pictures,” “moving pitchers,” “I ought to of went,” and all the rest of the verbal atrocities that the ungrammatical blunder into, must be corrected. Winning and keeping a girl’s regard must be regarded as seriously as getting ahead in business. Wooing thus includes a course in self-improvement, along every line. It will do no harm to obtain a book of handy helps in grammar, in etiquette, and the like. Don’t eat peas with your knife, or wear a red tie with a dinner jacket: unless the girl prefers it. In that case, the advice is the reverse: study the proper mistakes to make. Later on, you can gradually lead the girl toward improving herself. Make yourself attractive in every way in the eyes of the girl, and of the relatives or friends on whose judgment she relies.
The moral qualities go along with this. The normal girl will prefer a man who stands well in men’s eyes: that is, who has the reputation of a he-man, equipped with at least an average amount of human courage. As a matter of fact, if the last sentence were truer, it would be better for girls. A large number of them, unfortunately, prefer instead the man whom women like, and men dislike: the parlor lizard type, the afternoon tea snake specimen, the namby-pamby woman-pleaser who never makes a success of anything in life except wooing women. There is a thrill, beyond doubt, in being wooed and kissed by such a man: there is much unhappiness in a continuing relationship with him.
Having made yourself attractive, the next thing is to make yourself important and indispensable in the girl’s eyes. If the girl is sensible, a display of sensible ideas on matters of life will aid; if she is frivolous minded, a display of a frivolous, spendthrift nature is more shrewd. Do the things she expects of you: date her up as often as she desires--it may take all of your shrewdness to ascertain the fact, too. Take her, not essentially where you want to, but where she wants to go. If you adore boxing matches, and she prefers Coney Island and art museums, postpone the boxing matches and take in the others. If you like good music, and she cares only for the movies and baseball, first make up your mind whether you want to continue to woo her; and, if you do, especially at first, take her where she wants to go, and only slowly and tactfully sprinkle in with the cinema thrills and the paid athletics a small dose of Brahms and Beethoven. Do what she expects of you: and always do a little more. That is, do the unexpected thoughtful little things. Find out her favorite foods, chewing gums, cigarettes, people, amusements; and go out of your way to provide her with these. If you like chewy chocolates, and she detests candy and adores pickles, do not provide her with an elegant two pound box of chewy chocolates. Don’t be like the married man who presents his timid old-fashioned wife with a box of cigars for Christmas, and then smokes them himself. Be more courteous and thoughtful to her in public that she has a right to expect. This advice is sound, unless the girl is of the rare clinging vine type who wants a man to bang her around in alleged he-man style. If that is what she wants, give her all the banging she can stand. Make your motto, “We Strive to Please”--and do more than strive.
You will want, and she will expect, some physical love from the start. Among different strata of society, customs as to kissing and caressing differ. Never give the girl less than she expects. After you have found out that she likes to be kissed, you will disappoint her permanently if you give her the sort of kiss you would give dear old Aunt Tabbie, aged ninety-eight in the shade. Yet remember to think of her wishes primarily: don’t give her the sort of kisses you want first, but the kind that she wants. Your artistry will come in subtly leading her to want things that you want. And, once a woman is generally satisfied with a wooer, and wants his approval, she moves swiftly to the place where she wants to please her lover in every way. Then the desires coincide: and the man can read his own wishes, and know them for the girl’s as well.
_Problems of Wooing._--The man should find out what he wants from the girl--whether a mere flirtation, a temporary mating, or a permanent one--and adapt his technique to gaining his goal. For instance, in the question of letters. He should do his best to satisfy a girl’s craving for love letters, if separations occur. In all probability, he cannot satisfy her desires here: what she really wants is his presence, and a thousand-page letter does not give the thrill of that. Ordinarily it is not the best tactics to spill over endlessly in a love letter: a chatty, companionable letter, with artistically worded love phrases that hint a vast withheld reservoir of love, is better as a rule than pages of sugary sentimentality. Except at the very first, when all rules of sanity are laid aside. And yet, recall that, if you desire subsequently to retire from the courtship, love letters may be very embarrassing. Try to phrase your letters so that they mean everything to the girl, and nothing to the outside world, which may have the pleasure of reading them in newspaper columns featuring a breach of promise case. It is well to keep this possibility in mind from the start. Don’t store up trouble for yourself in this fashion. Be cryptic and allusive, leaving more than half for the girl to read between the lines. It may save you trouble in the long run.
As for wooing and proposing by proxy, even the most bashful person had just as well learn that it is suicidal. The proxy brings a message to the girl that should come from the beloved man: insensibly her emotion goes out to the bearer of the message. Captain Miles Standish sent John Alden to woo Priscilla for him, and the maiden wisely said, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” King Edgar’s trusted courier wrote the king that the maiden he desired to wed was ugly and wholly unattractive, and then proceeded to marry her himself for her beauty, for which the king later lopped off the man’s head. Wooing by proxy is much worse than not wooing at all.
As for quarrels, the more experienced wooer will have few or none of them. Beginners in love will insensibly drift into them. Now quarrels have no place in most real loves: they are a sign of some concealed dislike or aversion, which may take a more virulent and costly form after the wooing has been made irrevocable, or comparatively so, by marriage. If the quarrel can be easily patched up, well and good; but if quarrels constantly come, it is a bad omen. The only exception is where both man and girl enjoy a quarrel more than peace, and mate in order to have a mate to quarrel with for life. This is abnormal; and, if you are a normal man or girl, understand that quarrels, especially if they are usually over trifles, are a good warning to break off the courtship and look elsewhere.