The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-09-26
I think it is cnnrenaIitv

I think it is congenality. %f a married couple has that nothing else matters. They will be happy no matter what vicissitudes of fortune they are called upon to go through together. And if they lack congeniality nothing else matters either. They will be miserable, even though they have every other bless- Ing under the sun.
 The reason that marriage is so often 8 failure; the reason that so many people fly to the divorce courts to get rid of the husbands and wives with whom they were so madly in love few years ago and whose companionship they now find unen- durable; the reason that so many homes are perpetual storm centers is because men and women give so lit tie heed to this question of similar ity of taste and interest in select ing their mates.
 Nor are they to blame for this. Nature, which cares only for the good of the race and not at all for the happiness of the individual, has ordained that there shall be fatal attraction of opposites. This Is why big men cannot resist baby dolls; why learned men become infatuated with beautiful morons; why grave and sedate men fall in love with girls whose whole conception of life is jazz party, and why the poor man who has his way to make in the world is irresistibly attracted to the human fashion-plate.
 And they get married and live scrapplly ever afterward.
 For having drawn together the man and the woman who had not thought, nor an ideal nor an ambi tion in common, nature washes her hands of the job, and leaves them to work out their fate with tears and heartaches and misery.
 Tis attraction of the opposites does not last. It is a mere flash in the pan, gone before the ink on the wedding certificate Is hardly dry, and then we have the tragedy of two people being tied together for life who have nothing in common, who do not even speak the same language.
 Before marriage their difference from each other gave each the fasci- nation of an undiscovered country to the other. After marriage it builds stone wall between them that Strange, but true, that the very un- likeness that attracted a couple to each other before marriage repulses them afterward.
 
 The ignorance that the intellectual man found so enchanting in his sweetheart bores him to tears in his wife. The perpetual giggling, and laughing, and jumping about that enchanted the quiet man in a girl nerves when he has to endure them day in and day out. The man whose fancy was ravlshed by the girl who was living picture, and whose clothes made every other woman green with envy, views her with different eye when he finds that he spends his life toiling to pay mill liners and dressmakers.
 Doubtless, even King Cophestua | knocked the beggar maid, with whose | simplicity he had fallen in love. for not being sophisticated and Knowing | the ways of courts and lacking re- gal air when he got her home.
 Enduring love and perfect compan- | ionship Is only possible between peo- pie who are made of the same clay | and cast in the same mold. The | friends of whom we never tire are | those who like the same dishes we | do; who vote the same ticket; who | read the same books. and who canter | along by our sides on the same | hobby horses,
 We soon weary of those who have no taste and interest Tn commo With us: who prefer corn beef and cabbage | to the masterpieces of a French chef; who never see anything through our | eyes; who yawn in our faces when we try to talk about the book or play | that has stirred us to the very depths of our soul, and with whom conver- sation always degenerates into an ar gument that tleaveA us sore ana bruised in spirit.
 
 And If this Is true of just ordinary friends and -acquaintances, 1t is a thousandfold more true of husbands and wives. No matter what virtues and good qualities; no matter how true and loyal they may be; no mat ter how conscientiously they do their duty by each other, their marriage is hound to be a failure unless they are congenia1. They are bound to lose their affection for each other unless