Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 259, 23 January 1928, Page 4

Mundane Musings

Hating One’s Husband!

Perhaps it is nearly impossible for any two ordinary human beings to live together night and day, year after year, for a whole life-time, without suffering periods of the hottest and most intense hatred, the one for the other.

There is no hatred in the world like the hatred of married people when they hate. They are not like enemies separated by half a country, or even by the length of a street. There they are, under th esame roof, eating at the same table, sleeping in the same room no matter how bitter their feelings may be temporarily. This brings the unrivalled opportunities and temptations for continual onslaughts and insults; for woundings beyond the imagination of inexperienced people; and for incessant prickings with the goads of their mutual angers and resentments.

I am inclined to think that wives hate their husbands more often and more definitely than husbands liate their wives, says May Edginton, the popular English writer of fiction. It seems to me that this is probably because, after the first passionate few years—or less —the man’s marriage interest is overlaid by his business interests.

If a husband and wife quarrel * on Sunday, the man goes forth cn Monday morning, and once he is mixing again with men and affairs, the importance of what, on Monday, seems to him the mere domestic jar of Sunday, is apt to fade. On the other hand, his wife remains in the setting of the quarrel, therefore she cannot easily obliterate it. She has, probably, put all her eggs into, one basket —the basket of marriage. Marriage is, in all .likelihood, at once her love, life and her career; she becomes terrified, desperate at tho thought that all life hangs on the moods and tempers of another person; that equity often finds no place there; that she must, somehow, “manage” by tact and placation, someone whom, in her resentment, she wants to wound and reproach. If she is dependent on her husband for every sixpence, she probably controls herself; she forces herself to pretend to agree merely for peace’s sake. She loses her love for her man. She hates him.

Jogging Along Well, one cannot raise the dead. When love is dead, it is dust. But, as time goes on, in the case of two fairly decent people, very good substitutes may arise from its ashes. Affection, appreciation, tolerance, friendliness, loyalty—these are all very good oil for the wheels of married life. They are attained by many couples who once thought, in some moment of passionate rage, that all was surely over between them. A woman who hates her husband is usually of what is called the sheltered type. She has lived in a certain narrowness of domesticity, and knows too little of male nature, and the thousand and one complexities of . life. Sometimes this woman will hate her husband merely because he doesn’t seem to want to come away with her and the children to the seaside; sometimes she will hate him for an irritatirig mannerism; sometimes for injustice; sometimes for satire; sometimes because, partway through her married life, when the first thrills are over, she has a recrudescence of romance and feels he is too prosaic. Sometimes she has real reason to hate him; but more often the reasons are not big enough for hate. Monotony Makers But if such a WjOman rubb-d shoulders with the -world more, if she had been forced to stand on- her own feet and fight for herself, she would often realise that, after all; when she married her husband, she picked a vinner. She would learn that it is not only in marriage that a dissimilar point of view is better left unexpressed. She would learn that not only in marriage must she dissemble. She would see injustice, not only within the circle of the wedding-ring, but outside it; she would find far more deadly monotony in any weary boarding-house than she need endure in her own home. This means that women often make their own monotony. And she would —if. she Is but an average woman of average capabilities—find, in nine cases out of 10, that a moderately comfortable marriage was the best bet that she ever made. No woman who knows anything worth knowing of life and people would ever hate a reasonably good husband. He has his idiosyncrasies? She would know he has a right to them. Occasionally he takes his typist out to lunch? Let us hope it will amuse both him and the hard-up girl. He was rather unjust over the laundry bill? Well, he didn’t realise, possibly, the whys and wheref.-res. He is not, anyway, the only person in the world. So the wise woman, with her eyes open, regards the matter. When a woman hates her husband, it is often—though not quite always—because she is too inexperienced in life’s hardships ever to have learned to make a real comparison of values. In the realm of jewellery, square designs seem to be taking the place of beads. A typical necklace, worn with a charming frock in a bronze hue, was of square-cut topaz. Such ornaments set the keynote for the jewelled millin-ery-motif. Thus, with the frock in question, was worn a turban hat with a topaz ornament placed conspicuously to the side.