DOROTHY DIX: Does Every Wife’s Love for her Husband Eventually Turn to Hate?

[The Welland-Port Colborne Evening Tribune, 6 October 1931]

DEAR DOROTHY DIX- If a woman loves a man, is she just bound to hate him some day as much as she once loved him? My mother loved my father very devotedly for years, but now she seems to detest even the sight of him. She criticizes him in the presence of us children and ridicules him. She mortifies him before his friends and gives him to understand that he is a born fool and everyone knows it. I am 19 years old and have observed families all my life, and to my sorrow I find that husbands’ and wives’ love seem to turn to hate in almost every home I know.

Now I love a young man very dearly, but I would rather die alone than marry him and nag his life out of him, as my mother does my father. Is a man bound to a woman who accepts his food and shelter, yet twists him like a criminal?

PUZZLED ONE

You poor, pitiful young thing. What distorted and morbid ideals of love and marriage your unhappy home life has bred in you.

And what a wicked thing your mother has done in poisoning your mind until you can no longer get things straight or judge them fairly so that you imagine that all husbands and wives come to hate each other and that love is bound to turn into loathing. Why, that isn’t true my dear. If it were true, the papers would be filled with accounts of husbands and wives who had murdered each other instead of its being so rare a crime it makes the front page. Divorce would be universal and there would be no happy homes.

But all about us we see men and women who have lived together thirty or forty or fifty years and who are more devoted to each other in their old age than they were in their youth. We see men and women who have loved each other well enough to overlook each other’s little faults and for each other’s transgressions against them.

So you are all wrong when you think that love is bound to die. Real love is the hardest thing in the world to kill. It will survive neglect and starvation and bad treatment and still live on. Look at the women who still have the drunken husbands they fish out of the gutter, who cling to unfaithful husbands, who work and support lazy, trifling husbands, who wait outside of prison doors to take back the husbands who have disgraced them. Look at the men who put up with peevish, neurotic wives; who spend their lives working to give finery to extravagant wives; who even forgive the wives that they know dishonor them.

But because your mother is a bad wife is no indication that you will be a bad one. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that her conduct will prove an awful warning to you and that you because she has so ill-treated your father you will probably go to the other extreme and spoil your husband to death.

You have resented the way in which your mother criticizes your father and you will be very careful not to find fault with your husband. You have felt how unjust it was in her to try to prejudice her children against their father and you will hold your husband up as a model to his children. You have felt what an unsportsmanlike thing it was for your mother to say things to your father in company that he could not publicly resent without making a scene and you will not play such a low-down trick on your husband.

The most peaceful and happy home that I know almost one in which no arguments or bickering is permitted and the husband is treated with deference and consideration, is one presided over by a woman who was reared in a home of strife and quarrelling and whose mother treated her husband pretty much as your mother treats her.

Certainly I do not think that a man is under any obligation to support the woman who mistreats him. Furthermore I consider that if a woman cannot constrain herself to be at least polite to her husband, decency demands that she should not eat his bread and salt.

But don’t be afraid of love, my child. Go on and marry your nice young man and give him a better run for his money than your mother is giving your father.

DOROTHY DIX

Sisters Comment: Sister Mary Ordinary, Instructor of Philosophy at the local university, who has studied the teachings of the late Tutorial Jennings, believes that doing under others as they would do unto you is an excellent philosophy to live and love by. However, in all fairness, since this appears to be a later life change in your mother’s attitude toward her matrimonial mate, perhaps a wee bit of dementia has entered the picture and could prove to be why your mother has shown this lapse of judgment. Run, don’t walk to the nearest clinic to seek evaluation before your milquetoast appearing father races into the welcoming arms of another.