Harrisburg telegraph. [volume] (Harrisburg, Pa.) 1879-1948, 1917-03-01
PASS UP MARRIED
FLRT! DEARIES
Dorothy Dix Tells Girls How
Foolish and Futile Such
Affairs Are
BY Dorothy Dix,


the one who makes the biggest mis-
take and the one who does the most
wrong to herself ad other people is
the girl who gets inveigled into love
affair with married man.
She is foolish because she is in
variably the victim; because she is
the one who has to pay the full price
of the tarnished romance because
she wastes her youth and the fresh
ness of her affection on a man who
cannot marry her if he would
She makes a mistake because she
puts herself in an equivocal position,
and no girl comes out of such a situa-
tion without bedraggled skirts. So
ctety takes small stock in platonic
friendships between men and women
and none at all in platonic affection
between married man and a girl.
She does wrong to herself because
she is blighting her life in the begin
ming by making false start, and she
does wrong to other people because
she is breaking up a home, and no
woman has ever yet built her house
OF happiness on the wreck of another
woman's happiness and found any
peace and joy in it,
A girls worst enemy could find no
better way to destroy her than to in
duce her to fall in love with a mar
ried man, yet | know many girls who
boast that they have an especial fas-
cination for married men, and who
seem to find a particular zest in fiirt-
ing with them.
These girls think it great fun to
carry on their flirtations with mar
ried men right under their wives
noses, and shrek with laughter as
they tell how some fat, grizzled, mid
dle-aged woman turned pea green
with jealousy as they whisked her
husband away from her.
Certainly any girl who could en-
joy witnessing the suffering of poor,
helpless wife, who knows all too we'll
that her beauty and charms have
faded, while some girl young enough
to be his daughter makes a fool of
her husband, lives too late She be-
longs to the time of the Inquisition,
and would have made a lovely little
torturer.
Before you engage in a Irritation
with a married man, girls, just put
yourself in the wife's place. Some
day you will be married. Think how
you would feel if you saw some
younger and prettier woman cajoling
your husband away from you.
But you don't even have to be al
truistic to perceive the wisdom oi
avoiding love affairs with married
men. It's self-preservation. To be,
gin with. it practically shuts the door
of matrimony in your face.
The love time and the marriage
time of a girls life are short, and il
she doesn't make hay while the sun
of her youth and beauty shines, heI
harvest is an empty one.
| If girl wastes these years when
she might marry, on some married
man that she can never marry, she
throws away her chance of settling
herself for life, and by the time she
has walked up to the folly of her
course, or the married man has tired
/ of her and wants somebody still
younger and fresher, her opportunity
! is gone. Nor are men anxious to seek
as wife the heroines of this particu-
| lar kind of sentimental episode.
OF course, married men are Otter
very handsome and fascinating, and
they know how to make love beauti-
fully, and just the nice little things
to do that women like to have done
for them, but when you find your
self listening to one-and enjoy lis
tening-when he begins to tell you
that his wife doesn't understand him
and how unhappy he is at home, and
what your sympathy means to him
and so on, just stick your little fin,
gers in your ears, and take to your
! heels.
You are not a public comforter
and such a man means you no good
He's willing to break your heart, tC
blight your prospects in life, to com
promise your name just for his owr
amusement.
That is why I say, don't firt with
married men, girls.