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Show 1 j Dorothy Dix Talks I V .A SIDELIGHT ON DIVORCE i I Most intelligent people have come to see that divorce is not an unmixed evil, but a necessary evil. It if often the surgeon's knife that cuts awav the cankering sore in a life in order to save it, but just as surgery is not always al-ways an infallible cure for diseases, 1 so divorce is not a never failing rem- edy for domestic misery, ft, Sometimes divorce means jumping li of the frying pan into the fire, as the homely old phrase goes, and a man ' and woman who have been miserable I together in matrimony find them- f; selves still more wretched after they E are parted. Ater all, perhaps one gets attached I t0 one's sparring partner and feels I lost when deprived of. the enemy with whom one has fought for years. !' This is particularly the case with ii women, who are the complainants in more than three-fourths of the divorce j actions and who find out In the major- ( Ity of cases that their decrees absolute are boomerangs that annihilate them and that even a very indifferent hus- ; band may be better than no husband Without doubt men have the same H! experience, for there is no denying that with all its faults, its drawbacks, H even its martyrdom, matrimony does unfit people for the celibate life, and j the man who has grown accustomed to the comforts and discomforts of a home finds himself like a fish out of water when he is cast forth upon the cold comfort of boarding houses, hotels or clubs. He may have rebelled against hav-fflMi hav-fflMi ing to punch the domestic time clock; jaf ne mav have writhed under the tyran-cjjBBp tyran-cjjBBp ny of a wife who kept tab on his going out and coming In, and who told him -jgf what he should eat and what he should jgw wear, and what he shouldn't smoke or H drink; he may have begrudged the money that went to pay for shoes and fl groceries, and milk for the baby, iu- sieau oi tor pleasure; nis eyes may havo wearied of the sight of a fat old HI wife and turned longingly, towards HI sylph-like chickens, but that is while HI he is still bound hand and foot in the HI holy estate. HI Let the law strike his shackles HI from him and he soon finds that H I matrimony has done its deadly work. HI He is a tamed and domesticated crea- H ture who has learned to eat out of a HI wife's hand and he is lost without it. HI There is no thrill in staying out at Hi night when nobody cares whether you HI stay or not. What's the use of mak- HJ ing money when a man has no one of Hi his own to spend it on? Better even H is the nagging of an honest, faithful, H fat old wife than the jollying of the Bj painted lips of the sirens who work a man for all he is worth and from j'JtjSk, whom he soons turns in disgust. jMfMj Thus it happens that thousands of iJKhIP married couple who thought they could MpS not live with each other find that they Hj cannot live without each other, and it is a pity' that there is not some half- 1 way station in the divorce procecd- ines where the law could offer a hus- Iband and wife a chance to take back all the charges they have made against each other, and kiss and make it up. The thing that's the matter with matrimony after all is monotony. We try to run it as a continuous performance, per-formance, with never a let up or a break in it with the same face across the table at every meal, listening to the same line of conversation three hundred and sixty-five days a year, rasped by the same faults, weak nesses, peculiarities, habits and it gets upon our nerves. It's eating the thirty quails in thirty days that no appetite ap-petite can stomach. No wonder marriage la a failure. So would anything else be If we get too much of it. We loathe music, literature litera-ture and art when we get an overdose of them. People with barrels of money get no enjoyment out of spending it. Nothing bores like a perpetual round of pleasure. We pray Tor rain after a long succession of sunshiny days. And if people could only be married half of the time instead of all of It, or if every husband and wife had enough 1 intelligence to go off by themselves for a long vacation and give separation a chance to do its healing work, there would be few divorces. When we are very close to people peo-ple their faults rub us raw. But when we get away from them we get a clearer perspective and we see that we made mountains out of molehills, and that if another did wrong, we showed neither tact, nor patience, nor wisdom In the way in which we dealt with a difficult situation. The other day I met an unhappy woman who said to me: "Two years ago I divorced my husband hus-band because of an affair he had with another woman. I was mad with jealousy and I felt that I could never forgive him; I hated him, and all I wanted to do was to take my children and get as far from him as possible. I thought that divorce would somehow some-how bo a cure for the agony that was eating my heart out and that once I was free from my husband I would bo happy. "But I have been utterly miserable. Except for this one big sin against me, my husband was all that any worn-an worn-an could ask. He was good and kind and generous to me and the children. We had a pretty home, a settled place in society ,and I could devote myself to taKing care or my children. "My divorce changed all of that I have no home. I have had to go to work to help support ray children and they lack many things they need that their father could have given them. People pity me as a divorcee and I can see that even my family and my friends who urged me on to a get a divorce and not to stand being flouted by my husband, consider me a burden on them. "Believe me, if I were confronted with the same problem today there would be no divorce for me. I would I stick by my home and my place in I society and I'd shut my eyes to my j husband's philandering until he got tired and came back home repentant, as men always do, if you give them time enough. I should try to size the stiuation up fairly and take the lesser evil, instead of jumping into the greater one, for after all a hurt heart and wounded vanity are not as hard to bear as the loneliness and desolation desola-tion of the divorced woman who has no real niche in the world because she Is neither maid, wife nor widow. "Do you know what divorce is?" went on the woman. "It is a shock that brings people to their senses and makes them realize how much they care for each other. It made me know that I could never be happy without my husband. It cured his infatuation infatua-tion for the woman. When he was free to marry her he didn't want to do it. Now he wants mo to come back to him, to try the experiment over again, but my family and friends advise me against it and say that if he was falth- ' less once he will be faithless again, but I need him and the children need hlra. What shall I do?" "Marry him," I said. "You both found out that there is one thing worse than matrimony, and that's divorce. And the next time when you begin to quarrel, take a good long- trip. Temporary Tem-porary separation is the only sure antidote for the divorce evil." 00 |