"A Guide to Men" by Helen Rowland - 07 - Divorces (Third Interlude)

DIVORCES LOVE, the quest; marriage, the conquest; divorce, the inquest. Most marriages, nowadays, seem built for speed rather than for endurance. A divorcée is one who has graduated from the Correspondence School of Experience. Marriage, according to the merry Widow-reno, is a "perfectly lovely experience to have had!" Grass Widow: The angel whom a man loved, the human being he married, and the devil he divorced. Most actresses are married-now and then; most literary women-off and on; most society women-from time to time. In olden days, the lover cried, in burning words and brave, "Oh darling, be my Queen, my Bride-and let me be your slave!" But nowadays, he murmurs, over cigarette and tea, "Say, when you get your next divorce, will you (puff) marry me?" [74] When a woman obtains her second divorce, one hardly knows whether to class her as a good loser, a bad chooser, or just a "poor sport." Why is it that when a man hears that a woman has had a "past," he is always so anxious to brighten up her present? Many a woman's sole reason for getting a divorce is because she is tired of holding onto heaven with one hand and onto a man with the other. When two people decide to get a divorce, it isn't a sign that they "don't understand" one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to. That "just-after-the-divorce" feeling is not the exhilarating thing many people imagine it. It is more like the mingled sensation of pain and relief that comes the moment after you have removed a tight slipper and before the ache has subsided. Divorce is the Great Divide, over which most men expect to pass into the Happy Hunting Grounds. Reno! The land of the free and the grave of the home! THIRD INTERLUDE IN the abstract a man admires nobility and intelligence in a woman; but in the concrete he always prefers a bird of Paradise to a wren, a decoration to an inspiration and incense to common sense. "Intuition" is what a man calls a girl's ability to see through him, before marriage; "suspicion" is what he calls it, after marriage. Satan, himself, could no doubt make any woman love him, if he took the trouble to convince her that it was "her beauty that drove him to Hades." Of course, polygamy is dreadful; but, at least, an Oriental wife can come within four or five guesses of knowing where her husband spends his evenings. Take care of a woman's vanity-and her love will take care of itself. Ever since Eve started it all by offering Adam the apple, woman's punishment has been to have to supply a man with food and then suffer the consequences when it disagrees with him.[76] The wings of love are not clipped by marriage; they merely molt for lack of exercise. All love is 99.44 per cent pure: pure imagination, pure vanity, pure curiosity, pure folly or whatever else it happens to be. Don't waste your tears on the girls a heart-breaker should have married and didn't; save them for the girl he will marry and shouldn't. It requires a little moisture to make a postage stamp stick and a little cold water of indifference to make a sweetheart stick. There are only two kinds of perfectly faultless men-the dead and the deadly. In order to see a man in his most interesting colors a woman always has to scrape off a lot of unnecessary whitewashing. Marriage is a discord that turns "Love's Old Sweet Song" from a eulogy into an elegy. The height of the average girl's ambition is just about six feet.[77] You can always cure a man of love-sickness with "mental suggestion" merely by suggesting to him that the girl is trying to marry him. Marriage is the operation by which a woman's vanity and a man's egotism are extracted without an anaesthetic. Jealousy is the false alarm that wakes us up from love's young dream. The most successful men are not those who have been inspired by a wise woman's love, but those who have perspired in order to gratify a foolish woman's whims. It is easier to keep half a dozen lovers guessing than to keep one lover after he has stopped guessing. A man's soul lies so close to his digestion that when he looks blue and downhearted, a woman never knows whether to offer him a kiss, a meal, a dose of philosophy or a dyspepsia tablet.[78] A woman is so complex that she can prove to a man by every possible convincing argument that she feels nothing but platonic friendship for him, at the same time that she is thinking how she would like to run her fingers through his hair. One reason why a man's life is so much fuller than a woman's is because he spends nearly three-quarters of it in hunting up things for a woman to do. Oh yes, a woman always looks up to a brave, strong man whom she can respect-and then nine times out of ten, goes and marries some pallid weakling whom she can "mother." A man spends his boyhood struggling against an education, his youth struggling against matrimony and his middle-age struggling against embonpoint; but sooner or later he succumbs to all of them. No man wants an "equal" but an angel. If Satan himself should decide to marry he wouldn't go around looking for a congenial little Satanette, but for a paragon who had a pull with St. Peter. HALF A LOVE IS BETTER THAN NONE