Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1883-12-27
Happiness in Marriage.

To live happily together in marriage
is usually held to be the unqualified
and undoubted duty of all married
people. Society does not as yet enter
tain the idea that people who have been
married can have any moral right to
live apart, or that it can by any posi-
| bility be better in 4 moral point of view
that they should live apart if it is pos
sible for them to live together At the
same time society acknowledges the
complete blamelessness of a life of
ceibacy on the part of persons who
could just as well live married as sin
gle.
And yet the capacity of people to live
happily together in marriage is by no
means coeXtensive with the capacity or
inclination to get married, as this in
discriminate and ad capta1dun1 notion
on the part of society seems to imply.
Happiness in marriage implies many
things besides that underlined quality
known as cOngeniality. 1t often i'm
plies the continuance of the parties in
essentially the same condition of finan-
cial prosperity or stringency, as the
case may be, as they were in when they
married. If the couple subsequently
rise from poverty into wealth, it is al
most more likely to be fatal to their
congeniality than if they pass from
wealth into poverty. A wife who PROV
ed economical almost to the point of
parsimony on a salary of 1000 a year
will sometimes blossom out into the
most confirmed spendthrift when her
husbands name appears at the head of
the firm.
Or the husband, who was very atten-
tive and companionable to his wife
while in a business which kept him Sc
cluded from the society of other ladies,
expects her to rely on her own re-
sources more for amusement as he
finds himself entertained by a larger
number.
Congeniality also involves elements
of health, which retiring, the congeni-
atty retires with them. Some persons
are most cOngenial to persons of the
other sex when i'll; others are only at
tractiVe when well.
1t is easy to forgive the petulance of
a confessed invalid, but not so easy to
overlook the apparent preference of
the convalescent for ''a handsomer"
person.
The growing individuality of ones
marital partner in q clearly inherited
but quite unexpected direction is also
a difficult subject to deal with. But
because woman with the figure of a
fairy at 20, expands into unexpected
fairness after 40, need it be assumed
that she is failing in some duty to her
husband? If great troubles take man
and wife nearer together, is it not pos
sible to so treat the little troubles as to
prevent them coming up as incidents
or causes of the alterations or jeal-
ousies or bitternesses that lead to di-
vOrce?
1t is said that soldiers who stand
shoulder to shoulder in fierce battles,
or 90 together through privations and
trials, become forever the best of
friends. If this be true, it would seem
possible for men and women to come
out of the fight for success in life with
attachments strengthened. That thous-
ands of married people have done so is
a fact that must have weight against
the theory becoming popular that a
man does not take wife or a woman a
husband for better or worse Chicago
Inter- Ocean.