ACCIDENTAL MARRIAGES.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume XI, Issue 1312, 21 April 1883, Page 3

ACCIDENTAL MARRIAGES.

A Man should marry by all means : yet I am convinced the greater part of marriages are unhappy, and this is not an opinion that I give as corning from myself; it is that of a very excellent, agreeable, and sensible lady, who married the man of her choice, and has not encountered ostensibly any extraoordinary misfortune, as a loss of health, riches, children, &c. She told me this unreservedly, and I never had any reason to doubt her sincerity. For all this, I am convinced a man cannot be truely happy with a wife. It is a strange state of things we live in A tendency so natural as that of the union of sexes ought to lead only to the most harmonious results ; yet the reverse is the fact, There is certainly something radically wrong in the constitution of society ; the times are out of joint. It is strange, too, what little real liberty of choice is exercised by those even who marry according to what is thought their own inclinations. The deceptions which the two sexes play off on each other bring as manv ill-sorted couples into the bonds of Hymen as ever could be done by the arbitrary pairings of a legal match-maker. Many a man thinks he marries by choice who only marries by accident; in this respect men have less the akvantage of women then is generally supposed.—One of Lord Byron's Letters.