Higher Standards are Being set up in the Choice of a Husband.—Should be Worthy of both Love and Respect.—Love Likely to Idealize the Man.—The Real Characteristics Necessary.—Deficiencies in Character not to be Supplied After Marriage.—The Right to Demand Purity.—Young Men Who “Sow Wild Oats.”—Importance of Good Health.—Weaknesses and Diseases Which Descend from Parents to Children.—The Parents’ Part in Aiding to a Wise Choice.—The Value of the Physician’s Counsel.—One Capable of Supporting Wife and Children.—A Dutiful Son Makes a Good Husband.—Essential Requisites Enumerated.—The Father Reproduced in His Children.—The Equivalents Which the Wife Should bring to her Husband.
“Each generation of young men and women comes to the formation of sex union with higher and higher demands for a true marriage, with ever growing needs for companionship. Each generation of men and women need and ask more of each other. A woman is no longer content to have a ‘kind husband’: a man is no longer content to have a patient Griselda.”—Charlotte Perkins Stetson.
“Who weds for love alone may not be wise:
Who weds without it angels must despise.
Love and respect together must combine,
To render marriage holy and divine:
And lack of either, sure as fate, destroys
Continuation of the nuptial joys,
And brings regret and gloomy discontent
To put to rout each tender sentiment.”
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
What shall be the ruling characteristics of the man I shall marry? is the question that every young girl has answered long before she may be conscious of it herself. As one and another of her acquaintances marry, she mentally concludes that this and that trait which the new bridegroom possesses, would not do at all were she the bride. And so year after year the mental, moral, and physical make-up of the man she is to choose, grows into completeness, as this imaginary being is shaped to her liking.
James Lane Allen says truly, “Ideals are of two kinds. There are those that correspond to our highest sense of perfection. They express what we might be were life, the world, ourselves, all different and better. Such ideals are like lighthouses; but like lighthouses are not made to live in, but for beacons. Neither can we live in such ideals.[59] But there are ideals of another sort. It is these that are to burn for us, not like lighthouses in the distance, but like candles in our hands to light each step of the way.”
When you began to love you began to idealize the man you loved, and the danger is with most women, that the ideal is so near perfection that the reality brings to them a rude and dangerous awakening. Dangerous, because they allow the ideal to usurp the place which belongs to the real, and because all the way along they are comparing the real in lover and husband, with the ideal.
Therefore, dear, remember that you are human, and since the real, not the ideal matches your human nature, expect the man who chooses you, and whom you choose, to be human also.
But there are certain characteristics, certain soul-possessions, that every young woman, if she herself be really fitted for matrimony, has a right to expect; nay more, to demand, of the man she chooses. Discovering that these are lacking, let her not cheat herself with the belief that she can, after marriage, school him in these missing qualities until they are fixed traits, for the rule does not read that way. The time for easy implantation of fixed characteristics is[60] gone, and whatever is now taken on, is apt to set uneasily. What sins and gross faults are coaxed down after marriage are very apt to leave glaring scars, both in the husband’s character and in the wife’s soul.
The wife has a right to expect that the man she marries shall be as pure as herself, and she has a right to know it. How can she know it? If she cannot devise a way to know this for a certainty, as she values her happiness, let her take no step further. Better by far, single blessedness, than marriage with a moral leper.
That many of the young men who move in so-called first-class society, are moral lepers, is as true as lamentable. The complacency with which so many parents have said, with an assumed sigh, “Young men must sow their wild oats,” has prepared the soil for this waywardness to thrive in, and the condoning which such sins receive when found in young men, has cultivated the contagiousness until its prevalence is alarming in the extreme.
Let her beware that she choose not her husband, through sentiment alone. Sentiment is an unwise guide and always purblind.
Should health be a consideration in choosing a husband? Most assuredly. Were the fortunes of none of the human family, save yourselves, affected by your choice, it would make less difference; but while with this generation lies in large measure the health and happiness of the next, the question of health in matrimony is one of great importance.
When it is no longer a disputed question that consumption, cancer, scrofula, insanity, and a host of lesser ills, are transmitted from generation to generation, any thoughtful young woman will consider her responsibility in the matter in question. If you have the spirit of the martyrs in you, and are prepared to give your life to nursing your husband and children, even this self-abnegation will not atone for the wrong of thrusting upon the world more degenerates.
You would need to trace the history of only one such family through a few generations, to note the mental, moral and physical degeneration, which results from the union of invalids. Even where but one of the parents is unhealthy, it is a sad part of the law of heredity, that the children more often follow the weaker parent, rather than the stronger.
Dr. Guernsey, a well-known medical writer, says: “Young men marrying with the[62] slightest taint of syphilis in the blood, will surely transmit the disease to their children. Beside this, thousands of abortions transpire every year from this cause alone, the poison being so destructive as to kill the child in-utero, before it is matured for birth; and even if the child is born alive, it is liable to break down with the most loathsome disorders, and to die during dentition. The few that survive this period are short-lived and unhealthy so long as they do live.”
Knowing this, is it not true that too much has been said derogatory to the parents having part in choosing their children’s companions in life? If in anything the parents’ opinion is of consequence, it is here where the life happiness and usefulness of their children are concerned. But the wisdom of the parents must be used in the early days of acquaintance, before the attachment has blossomed into sentimental love. Then the wisdom is interposed too late.
In discovering the character of your daughter’s associates, the family physician should be a valuable assistant. If he be a friend, as well as physician, he will gladly come to your aid.
“A striking indication of the spreading uneasiness, in regard to marriage, is given in[63] a bill recently introduced into the Ohio legislature, whereby it was proposed that all candidates for marital union should be required to undergo examination, and marriage be forbidden to such persons as shall be believed, through actual condition or hereditary tendencies, to be unfit for the function of parentage.”
Our daughters have a right to consider the prospect of a comfortable support. The man who has not already accumulated sufficient to support two, or who has not in his business relations a sure promise of such ability, has no right to ask any woman to join her fortunes with his. Love which will grow and strengthen in poverty, is beautiful in sentiment, but the poverty which nourishes such love is not the poverty which one marries into, but into which they are dragged by circumstances beyond the husband’s control.
It has been well said, that the young man who is a good son and brother will be a good husband; therefore it would be wise to accept an invitation to visit in the home of the one who seeks you as his mate. Mark well the consideration with which he treats his mother and sisters, his father and brothers, and judge whether it is assumed or natural. If he is one who demands much waiting upon[64] at home, be sure he will expect the same service of you; and if you are not prepared to give it, or are not perfectly sure you can reform him in this respect, call a halt, and give frankly your reasons for saying no to his proposal. The leisure for repentance is far more wisely chosen before, than after marriage.
Finally in the choice of a husband, the young woman should consider earnestly, whether she would like this man to be reproduced in her children. Whether he has the tenderness, the good judgment, the wise forethought, the patience, the forbearance, the authority, the nobility of character which will make him worthy the respect of wife and children.
Honor, truth, courage, daring,—properly restrained,—purity, strength, ability to plan and achieve; authority, not stubborn, but based upon ability and power; wise judgment, and the unobtrusive use of it, are the qualities which woman desires, and rightly in the man she loves. While, in return she must bring to him as crowning qualities, or she has not dealt fairly, honor for honor, truth for truth, courage for courage, endurance for strength—in short faculty for faculty, not always the same, but an equivalent.