Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1921-11-22
Dorothy Dix Talks-At What Age Should Man Marry
BY DOROTHY DIX

a YOUNG man wants to know what is the
~ right age for man to marry.
There is no one lucky day or year
in which it is perfectly safe for a man to en-
ter into the holy estate. Also mans fitness
for matrimony depends upon many other
things besides his age but, generally speak
ing, a man who marries when he is around
the thirtles-say, from twenty-eight to thir-
ty-fYe, has the best chance of being happy
| himself, and making the woman he marres
happy.
That Is his golden time of life He has
found himself. His tastes are TO. med. He
knows what he, wants in a wife. The flesh
pots have palled upon his taste enough to
make him banker for good plain home cook
ing, yet he is not blase and worn out and
ready to retire to the chimney corner He
can still thrill with romance, and enjoy a
good time, and he has not encased himself in
the tomb-proof selfishness of the old bache-
lor
For boy to marry is a misfortune to the
woman who gets him, and catastrophe to
himself.
1t is misfortune to the woman because it
takes lot of self-control, and forbearance,
and unselflshness and tact, and diplomacy to
make marriage a success, and no boy pos
sesses these qualities. 1t takes the discipline
of life, and the hard hand of a boss. and the
losing of jobs and the walking of streets
hunting for York to teach them to him.
The average boy is utterly undisciplined.
He is child who wants what he wants when
he wants it, and when he finds that his will
comes in conflict with that of another spoiled
child it is no wonder that they quarrel like
cats and dogs, and that so many bread and
butter romances end in the divorce court.
Early marriage is disaster for the man
himself on many accounts. For one thing
the man who marries before he :; we'll along
in his twenties takes a gamblers chance on
backing his own taste in women. And the
odds are a hundred to one against him. that
the girl who fired his fancy at twenty will
bore him to extinction when he il thirty.
This is the great tragedy of life, that a
man in his early youth will marry good,
sweet, dull innocuous girl who is, at the time
perfectly suitable mate for him because
| they are both crude, and immature, and ig-
norant, and only interested in the jelfy-bea
| type of conversation, and the latest dance
step, in all of which she is just as proficient
as he is. But the man goes out into the
world. His mind develops. He broadens and
deepens intellectually. He becomes polish
| ed and brilliant, while his wife stays put
! just where she was and what she was.
| He has outgrown her. He can no more fit
! hi. mind to hers than he could get on the
| clothes that he wore when he was a slender
| slip of boy. He would no more pick her
out for wife in his maturity than he would
make meal on the chocolate fudge that he
| used to devour by the pound. There are no
| marriages more unhappy than those in which
nature has separated couple by developing
one and not the other, and in which both
husband and wife 60 their lonely ways be-
cause they have nothing in common.
OF course, now Rnd then, there is a
| youthful marriage in which the man and
woman do grow up together, but these are
| as scarce as hens teeth. They are matri-