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Show KATHLEEN NORMS Block Thai Divorce Bell Syndicate WNU Features SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE if you can. Partly because marriage mar-riage is the very root and basis of our civilization, but partly, too, because there is no companionship compan-ionship or happiness in the world like that of a man and woman who have achieved a successful marriage. Don't think of your relationshiv with your husband as a fact ac complished, finished, settled, nevei to change. Think of it as being constantly in a state of develop ment, up or down, lor better oi worse. Either your marriage is a more perfect thing today than it was a year ago or it is a less per tect one. Which is it? Don't let it gefinto ah unimaginative unimagi-native rut, a daily pounding alone at distasteful drudgery. And don'1 tet its only bright moment be escape es-cape the radio, the movies, par ties, murder stories. Make it in Itself the core of your aappiness, the center from which all these amusements and activities spring. Easier said than done? Of course. But marriage, like anything else worth while, is a slow, hard, demanding de-manding job. And its success or failure is far more in the hands of the woman than the man. Money la The Boot Finances are of first importance and most wives fail in one of two particulars there and some fail in both. First, the wife won't keep expenses down to budget lines. And second, she takes no interest in how the money is made. This last, and it is the most common com-mon failing, is peculiar to American women. European wives share every moment of a man's care, anxiety, doubt. They know who the customers are, what taxes and rent are, what the man's hopes and plans are. But some of our women . . . Consider expenditures ... remain all their wedded lives in a state of supreme indifference and ignorance on those points. What they want is the money and nothing else. And some of them urge a man Into actual dishonesties in their eagerness for money. Once the money point is settled satisfactorily, the marriage is halfway to success. Girls before marriage ought to be encouraged to work out budgets, to consider expenditures. ex-penditures. The Cutter marriage was on the rocks 11 years ago this year. Everything Every-thing was wrong with it. The four expensive apartment-house rooms, the two exacting babies who started coughing' in November and didn't stop until April. The surveillance of Jim's mother. The money shortage. short-age. And all the details that dust, didies, dishes, disgust and disillusionment dis-illusionment could supply. The Cutters talked of divorce. But how? If Jim couldn't support his family in one unit, how could he support it in two? Quarreling Stops Then the older -baby got polio and Jim and Nancy were awakened. The carping, scolding, quarreling stopped like magic. Mother and father turned to the task of saving little Beverley. Beverley needed sunshine. So they drove out into the least fashionable fash-ionable of Toledo's suburbs and bought two acres and a shanty for $1,300. The house had electricity, but no bathroom, no furnace, no luxuries. "Freedom don't we all love it and I was free!" she writes me. "No telephone, no outside interests at all. Just Boppo, who was two when we went out there, and Bev getting well visibly, and Jim coming com-ing home a new man. He put our floor-heaters in, he got the garden into shape, he brought in the first two of my handsome brood of chickens chick-ens in his pocket tiny peepers to amuse Bev. In 1940 we mortgaged ourselves to the tune of $19,000 and built two five-room cottages on the front of our place. They are completely com-pletely separate from us, and they bring in $200 a month. Jim says nothing on earth can keep us from being snug and secure. a a a "Well, we aren't worried about that. We're happy. "I look back, at our life a few years ago," the letter ends, 'and I don't seem to be the same woman. That other woman always was trying try-ing to push her life aside and live in some dream. It took terror, poverty, change to awaken her. Ours isn't one of the sensational American stories. It wouldn't have mattered to anyone if our marriage had ended in divorce and our family been scattered to try all sort of miserable makeshifts. |
