MARRIED BLIGHT.

Otago Witness, Issue 4033, 30 June 1931, Page 66

MARRIED BLIGHT.

Will some enlightened soul kindly tell me why so many women, as soon as they’re married, promptly lapse into a state of mental coma, and shamelessly cease to take the slightest interest in anything outside their own garden walls? Dash it all, marriage isn’t as fossilising as all that! The one-time charming friend who used to be so alert and gay and up-to-the-last-moment with everything under the a year after marriage complacently sags back and murmurs, unblushingly: “ I’m afraid, darling, I never take any interest in that sort of thing .now!” “ That sort of thing ” being the usual, everyday subjects that naturally loom up when two or three people of average intelligence find themselves together! ¥¥ * .

No need to be interested and interesting—now they are safely and securely married. No need to fag and think things out for themselves—now! No need to do any blessed thing that spells effort —now! Colossal effrontery, I call it! Have you ever put in a full evening with a friend who’s let hep mind sag in the .middle and hasn’t the decency to try and prop it up? It’s the direst, deadliest, most disintegrating thing that can ever happen to you—and then some more! The unutterable, past-telling inside ache of it! Laboriously, desperately trying to pump up subject after subject —in the hysterical hope that it will hold out for five minutes. But it never docs! What4’d like to know is why marriage, more than any other job in life, should be an excuse for dullness? Why should they brandish marjiage in our faces as a sort of glorious Magna Charts, giving them the right to* be as dull and dreary and flabby as they like? Why should they be allowed to amblethrough life saying, in effect: “ Now we’re married we don’t care an acid drop what you think of us! We can be as moth-eaten and dreary as we like and you’ve jolly well got to put up with it.” And the sickening bit about it is that we do put up with it! They’ve somehow or other hypnotised us into the belief that a special dispensation has been handed out to them, giving them the right to bore us till 'we only want to die, and in return we mustn’t wen remark on the crashing boringness! * * * Well, we’ve had enough! The “ Excuse me, but I’m married! ” plea isn’t going to help you any more. We decline to excuse you! We don’t see the least reason why we should! You’re still fitted up with the same brains you had before you married. If you choose to let them run to seed that’s your own affair, and no reason at all why we should have to look pleased about it. If you choose to fill up the whole bl ess cd''day with household clutter, to the utter cxclflsion of everything else —well, that’s your affair, too, and no reason at all why we should be bored to tears by you! In plain, honest-to-goodness English, we’re through with married blight, and we’re glad to let you know it! We’re fed up with your dullness, your smugness, and your self-satisfiedness. If you choose to vegetate complacently in your own domesticity, you may, but don’t expect us to waste our precious moments of leisure on you.—Home Chat.