DOROTHY DIX: Why Shouldn’t Wives become Disgruntled About Marriage

..When Husbands Make No Effort to Understand Them, to Sympathize With Them, or to Show Them Any Appreciation.

[The Welland-Port Colborne Evening Tribune, 21 October 1931]

Why do wives get peeved and get into the what’s-the-use attitude toward matrimony? Men often wonder why their wives do not make the same effort, to be attractive and agreeable after marriage as they did before. The answer is: because husbands do so little to encourage wives to hold the lady-love pose.

The other day a lot of women were discussing this subject and one of them said:

“When I got married I was very romantically in love with my husband, and on his birthday, which happened to fall on a particularly hot August day, I worked for hours in a steaming kitchen making him a large and ornate cake. Then I sat down and wrote him a love letter in which I poured out my whole soul to him and told him how I adored him and how happy I was and how I blessed heaven for bestowing him as a husband upon me.

I made the dinner table very festive with candles and flowers and when I brought on the cake with the billet doux on top of it I waited with my heart in my mouth for my husband’s exclamation of joy and surprise and for his kiss that would have in it all that he felt for me and all that our marriage meant to him.

But nothing happened. Instead, he pushed his chair from the table and said: “Gosh, but it’s too hot to eat a gooey cake tonight!” Then he glanced causally at the beginning of the love letter and, remarking, “Why the gush note?” and stuffed it in his pocket without even reading it. So far as I know he never read it, for he has never mentioned it to me again.

I can laugh at the little fiasco now, but I shed a barrel of tears over it that night. And it was the last time I ever made a burnt offering of myself on the kitchen stove making a birthday cake for my husband and I have never tried since to tell him how much I cared for him.”

“Oh, I guess the most of us go through the same painful experience when we are cutting our wisdom teeth on matrimony,” said another woman.

“When I was first married I use to work myself nearly to death trying to keep my husband fascinated. I would doll myself up within an inch of my life in my prettiest frocks and I would buy the colors I thought he admired and I would spend hours grubbing over stock reports so that I could discuss intelligently with him the subjects he was interested in.

And after a while I found out that when I would ask him how he liked my new dress or hat he would look at it vaguely and say: “Is that another one? What is the matter with the one you have been wearing?” And then I would realize that he hadn’t looked at me enough to notice whether I had on a rag or a Paris confection.

And when I would hand him out of line of what I supposed was my spellbinder conversation he would just grunt by way of reply and I would know that he wasn’t listening to a single word I said.

So I gave up trying to look like a living picture and keeping him vamped, and now I dress to suit myself and have developed the evening-paper-and-sixth-best-ever habit myself, and we sit upon an evening in the usual family silence that is so thick you could cut it with a knife.”

“I married a poor and ambitious young man,” said the third woman, “ and determined to be a real helpmate to him. So I did all of my housework and kept his books for him at night and squeezed every nickel until I got six cents out of it and went shabby and did without everything on earth I wanted until finally I helped shove my husband over on Easy street.

But did he ever say ‘thank you’ to me? Or appreciate the sacrifices I made for him? Not much. All I did was to implant the idea in his mind that I was an abnormal woman who liked to work until she made her hands stiff and who didn’t care for the clothes and jewelry and the pretty things that other women love, and now when I spend money for the luxuries we can well afford, he thinks I have gone crazy with extravagance.”

And there you are gentlemen. Is there any wonder that wives get peeved with their husbands who never try to play up to them in their emotional moments? With husbands who never try to understand them? With husbands who never show any tact in dealing with them?

The marvel to me always is that so many women have the courage and the persistence to carry on in the face of the discouragement, that they daily have, that they keep on loving men who are just as cold and unresponsive as a graven image would be and who turn the back of their ears instead of their lips for a kiss; that they keep on baking cakes for men who knock them when they are heavy and gobble them down without a word of praise when they are as light as a feather; that they keep on trying to make home pleasant for grouches who never give them a pleasant word.

In his heart every man wants his wife to be sentimental about him. He wants her to adore him. Yet when she shows him some little romantic tenderness, he will wet-blanket it by his indifference, and he will even kill her love by his neglect.

Every man feels that it is his wife’s duty to make herself attractive to him and to be thrifty and economical and make him a comfortable home, but what encouragement is there for a woman to make any effort to please a man who never rewards her with a word of praise or by even showing that he thinks that she has turned out a satisfactory job?

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred a woman tries to live up to her husband’s ideal of her. She is what he makes her. She will love him as long as he will let her love him and so long as he responds to her affection. So long as her husband pays her compliments she will keep herself looking attractive and she will work her fingers to the bone to help the husband who regards her as a partner instead of a servant.

So gentlemen, if your wives don’t please you look for the fault in yourselves.

DOROTHY DIX

Sisters Comment: Having experienced limited knowledge to such goings-on, I most heartily suggest that unfortunate married ladies who are mired in the unsentimental endearments of husbandly souls, face the inevitable and plan their exit as discreetly as possible.