CONJUGAL UNFITNESS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5243, 12 January 1878, Page 2 (Supplement)

CONJUGAL UNFITNESS.

(From the New York Times.) It is generally supposed that every man and woman'of sound mind, and sound body is fitted for marriage. They certainly ought to be, and it maybe hard to see why they are not, but very little observation, makes the, fact, that they are not obvious enough. , As a .rule everybody marries, but it cannot be said, that as a rule every mrrriage is happy, or anything like it. The disagreements of most couples arise doubtless from their want. of adaptability to one another. If either or both had made a different selection, they might have got on quite comfortably. ~ ... ; But there are persons—men particularly—who ‘ seem constitutionally disqualified for matrimony or partnership of any kind ; and one of their unalterable convictions is likely to be that nature designed them for wedlock and sociability generally. Their experience may have contradicted their belief. They may have qurrrelled with all their associates from early youth upward. They may be mean, suspicious, jealous, tyrannical, enemies of friendship, repellers of sympathy and all gentle offices. Still their experience teaches them ■by contraries; they recognise consequences, but the cause they .ascribe to others, or at least to something outside of themselves. They are ■ precisely as they should be. ,It is , their acquaintances who are at fault, or if not.they, It is the perversity of circumstances which: 'thwarts desirable ends. . They may have'been married once or twice, and found marriage jbateful ; but this does not prevent them from new’ventures of the same tort, confident that ■ their own affectionate and domestic disposition must eventually .be answered, and the cou|hubial happiness produced they were born to; secure. . ,

! It might be thought that one inharmonious marriage, with its Jong train of unspeakable woes, would, after release by death or divorce, invest the question of another marriage with ■an awful responsibility. It would seem that ■he or she who has suffered from one such cruel disappointment would bo in dread of another, and would be deterred from re-entering a state so associated with bitterness and pain until time and reflection had given some guarantee against a recurrence of the tragedy. But, on the contrary, persons who have been unhappily 'married, and have escaped, through nature or through law, appear unusually eager to tempt matrimonial fortune again. They may think that having been unlucky once, they should be lucky, the second time ; that the repeated hazard.will yield, what the, first refused. Whatever they think, they act in a way to show that .they are incapable of . profiting by experience. ,;In,fact no amount of connubial wretchedness seems to keep peqple out of new alliances when they are pnee free, from the old. They, appear; to be incited , by wretchedness in the past to risk wretchedness in the future. :■ ' , They , never suspect for a moment that they are not tuned to matrimony; that matrimony

is,a pitch above or below them, and that it "and they, can never be .in accord. To them the very idea is preposterous. All that a man or woman needs , for happiness, they say, is a proper mate. They may be ; but there are men and women for whom a proper mate is unobtainable, or ought to be, in the interest oi civilisation. Such men and women, mainly the men, have no conception of true marriage or of the basis on which it rests. They be- , lieve that it should be all exaction on one side and all concession on the other ; that indifferences or unkindness should be met with devotion ; that rudeness, should evoke sympathy ; that loss of esteem sht uld be the crown of love. Failing to find congenial marriage on such terms after one or two experiments, they still persevere, and naturally persevere in vain. Persons' who get divorces, though there are many exceptions, are not generally in harmony with the institution of marriage, or, in other words, in harmony with themselves. They expect from marriage what is not and should not be in it. They seek to get everything, and give nothing in exchange. It might be. surmised that divorced people would avoid : and suspect one another ; but oddly enough, they often have a mutual affinity. The number of divorced men who have married divorced women would be surprising if it were known. Not unfrequently they get divorced again ; for, one divorce makes another easy,; and encourages the custom. To a certain sort of folks, too, there is in conjunction, disjunction, and reconmnction a wild excitement, not unlike drinking brandy before breakfast, and equally pernicious, ' There are persona incessantly declaiming against'marriage as an intolerable evil They have tested it fully, they declare, and therefore they know. The fact of their testing it proves nothing against, marriage, but only their unfitness for it, which a close observer would have granted without the experiment. And they vvill be sure to- test it again. Marriage, as at present managed, may not be all that it should be ; but it is so infinitely superior to anything yet proposed in its place, that it is well to remember that its traducers, instead of harming it, are merely abusing and hurting themselves. ,