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Show THE ART OF MARRIED LIFE. The sacred art and mystery of living together as husband and wife! It touches the deepest springs of human happiness and success. When the novel reaches its last chapter, when the wedding-day crowns the happy story of love and courtship, then begins for man and woman the real test of what they are; then is thrown upon their own hands the question of what the future is to be. In a true marriage the sweet season of romance that precedes the bridal day is but the harbinger of better things to come. But the secret is easily missed. It is missed oftenest probably through the man's fault. The first and great lesson of marriage is that the thought of another is to come before the thought of self. The revelation which true love makes is this: One sees in another soul such beauty and attractiveness that its service is preferred to the service of self. No emotion which lacks this high element deserves to be called love. The desire of possession, the longing for intimate and habitual companionship, these come in too, and make a part. But higher than these there is that complete and joyful self-surrender in which a woman appears so lovely to a man that to make her happy becomes his strongest desire; and a woman sees in a man such a nobility that she can gladly devote her life to him. That is the loftiness and the rapture of true love. The problem of married life is to maintain the nobility and elevation of this early sentiment. The chief requirement is simple enough. It is only, put your wife or husband before yourself in your thoughts and choices. To the wife this lesson is generally emphatically spoken by the circumstances into which marriage brings her. It gives her as her chief business the making of a home for her husband and afterwards for her children. The event of her day is his return from work. Her work is to make him comfortable and happy. His satisfaction and approbation are the standard of her success or failure. So she is put at once into an outward relation of service. Often there is a mingling of hardship in this. Before the wedding-day she was a queen; her will and wish were law. Her lover made it his first thought to please her. Now it must be her first thought to please him. His main occupation lies no longer with her, but with his daily work. He may be ever so devoted and tender, but most of his time and much of his thoughts must now go elsewhere. Her great business is his comfort and happiness; his great business is something apart from her. And he will never begin to know all she does for him. His mannish eyes miss half the little details of work that go to carrying on a household in comfort. He will be a somewhat rare man if he ever fully comprehends the broad fact that her individual life is merged in service to him. It is when some sense of those things breaks upon the woman in the early months of her married life that she stands face to face - as probably never before - with her destiny. And what destiny offers her is service. A hard gift to look upon at first! Declined or grudgingly taken it will wound and bruise a lifetime through. Bravely accepted it will temper the whole life to celestial sweetness. It is just here that the wife has the advantage over the husband that outward circumstances set straight before her the lesson of self-renunciation and service in the household, as they do not set it before him. His face must turn toward his daily work. There his best energy is spent and his vitality drained. When he comes home he wants rest. He feels himself, in a measure, off duty. And here he gets the full comfort of a good wife, and the home that a good wife makes. He is taken in and rested and shielded from annoyance, and encompassed by a hundred gentle ministries. Here he can forget the toils of his day, or review them in a serener light; finding here gladness for his successes, and comfort for his failures, and appreciation where others have misjudged him. Here body and soul find refreshment, and he is sent out a new man for the morrow's struggle. And if his wife is not allowed to give him this she is cheated as much as he is. This is her happiness and reward; this is what crowns her work. Yet this resting time has its danger. Who has not known men who were spoiled by the goodness of their wives? men who allowed themselves to receive until they utterly forgot to give? The more generously and gladly a wife gives the more watchful should the husband be that he makes due return. The foe of married happiness is inattention. The real wrong to the wife, the real failure of the husband is when he becomes unconscious of what she is doing for him, and what she is in herself. A man should every day see in his wife the woman she is. Whatever purity, sweetness, womanliness he once saw in her, and thrilled at the sight of, whatever fuller and richer growth the years have brought, these things he should see in her continually. Not a mere part of the domestic machine should she be to him, not even a mere comfort and convenience and pleasure to himself - her soul, in its full stature should come home to his constant thought. Whatever charm of face or manner, whatever womanly grace, whatever quickness of thought or delicate sympathy, would strike a stranger's notice, ought far better to be seen and prized by him, her husband. It is little to say that her face ought to be as beautiful each day to his eyes as if they looked upon it for the first time; it should be far more beautiful, because he has learned to see through its windows the soul within. And in the same way the wife should look upon her husband. It is this true, yet tender regard which makes the right atmosphere for the soul to ripen in. Few things touch us so deeply as to be understood. But to be understood and loved; to have the best that is in us made full account of; to know that our faults, too, are open to that sweet and gentle gaze; to long to be worthy of a love so pure and high that only our highest and ideal self can deserve it - what other influence can so strongly draw us toward all our noblest possibilities? This is the work of true marriage; to reveal two souls to each other in their ideal beauty, and then to bring that ideal to realization. -UNITY. |