Courtesy the Keynote To Domestic Happiness

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 41, 18 February 1937, Page 11

Courtesy the Keynote To Domestic Happiness

What is the salt which provides happiness in married life? Certainly it is unfailing courtesy between man and wife, states an Australian writer. Marriage is life with the veneer rubbed off. Human beings have no idea of how many faults they possess, or how they look to others, until they hear tho litany of their shortcomings, canted with relentless candour by their husbands or wives. Tho freedom to say just what one pleases to husband or wife has broken up more homes than any other cause.

Courtesy is the buffer which we interpose between ourselves and the unpleasant facts of life. Notvhere else is it so needd as in matrimony. Nowhere else is it so completely dispensed with, which accounts for the number and violence of the family jars we heur on every side. Every man, when he marries, believes himself a hero in the eyes of his wife. Every woman thinks her husband has idealised her into an angel, and both of them get the jolt of their lives when they are told in plain, unvarnished English that the other party not only regards them as human beiugs, but as pretty poor specimens of humanity at that.

The book that most needs to be written, and that will come nearest to fill* ing a long felt, want, will be a handy manual of etiquette for husbands and wives that will teach them to be as polite to each other us they are to strangers. In all homes courtesy is the pivot on which domestic happiness turns.