The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-10-31

Dear Dorothy Dix: I am in love with young man two years my senior. We have been going to- gether for several years and it Is our intention to marry as soon as he is making sufficient salary. The trouble is that he sems to be mak ing no progress whatsoever. He holds a minor position with a large company, and is not particularly brilliant, but seems to do his work very well. He has a host of friends and Is always lending them money which he never gets back. I am working myself and realize just how short a distance a small salary goes. I believe that if he could go into some kind of a position where good disposition and knack at making friends mean more than gray matter, he might get som ewhere,
 What shall I do? We are both still young, but we don't seem to be getting anywhere and this business of continuous courtipg is getting on
 my nerves.-L. M. J.
 Answer: There isn't any place where good disposition and knack. at making friends mean more than gray matter, L.. M. J. Itg brains that count in this hard, cold world, where the prizes go to the shrewd go getters and not to the lovable, easy going chaps whom everybody
 
 If your young man has a position with a large company, and just stays put. year after year. instead of rising to a better place and getting a big ger pay envelope, have the courage to face the situation as it is, and realize that he has about got his number. He has struck his stride and isn't likely to hit faster gait.
 Also realize that havig hosts of friends isn't an asset to young man. It is quite as likely to be liability. The man who can always be counted upon for touch never has any money in the bank, and there are thousands of men who spend more time and energy attend ing to theft friends affairs than they ever do on their own.
 If you are in love, then, with young man who has all the virtues except the vitrue of being able to make money, you have two courses open to you-you can either break off with him. or else marry him and mother him. You can protect him from his friends by taking his money away from him before they have a chance to borrow it, and you can spur him on to make the best of such business ability as he has. And as you are a business woman your self, you can keep on with your job Tor while until you save up enough money to have a little start in life.
 But you will always have to be the backbone of the family yourself You will always have to do the managing and the planning, and the looking ahead, and you alone can decide whether matrimony under such con dltions is worth the price.
 Money isn't everything, and very often the man who does not know how to push his fortunes, and who can never give his wife a fine house or a limousine gives her a tenderness companionship, a sympathy that makes her richer than any Mrs Croe- sus and that causes her to be envied by the wife of many a millionaire.
 My Dear Dorothy Dix: I have friend who Is married to a man old enough to be her father When the girl married him she felt that she would have a better chance for hap piness in marrying an old man, who was settled in his habits, than she wou'H if she married young man. Al had a girls dream about b. Ia Id mans darling.
 But she flnds the old man a tyrant. who never wants to go anywhere, or do anything that she wants to do He wants to stay at home all the time and Is upset If any of his hab- it's are changed. There is no com panionship or congeniality between them and the young wife is bored and miserable.
 To add to the horror of the situ- ation, there is young man whom she could care for, but she believes In being at least honorable, and loyal to her old husband. Do you not think if the old husband would only try to be companionable, and con- genial, and remember that his wife is entitled to some of the pleasures of youth that they might still be happy? FRIEND
 Answer: If there were some foun- tain of youth in which you could dip the old man and make him young, he and his girl wife might be con- genial and companionable, but, alas, there is no such miracle working place. Ponce de Leon never found it. Alchemists have never discovered the magic formula for transforming age into youth. Even monkey glands are failure. Age is age, and youth is youth, and never the twain shall meet on any common ground of un- derstanding.
 In all sober truth there is no other such insurmountable barrier between two people as age. Time makes a bridge over which the feet of neither youth nor age can pass. The young do not feel as the old feel They do not think as the old think. They have not the same tastes, nor de- sires, and. therefore, there can be no real companionship between them And that ma kes the tragedy of the marriage of a young girl to an old man, and of a man who marries a woman older than himself. They are bound to bore each other. They are bound to tire of each other. It is inevitable.
 The young wife wants to dance, to play, to go to places of amusement. She longs for gayety, for laughter, for the society of people of her own age. The old husband wore out the pleasures of youth years ago. He had his fill of dancing and of running about. Now his rheumatic old bones do not cry out for jazz. They yearn