A Sporting Chance for Husbands

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 580, 5 February 1929, Page 4

A Sporting Chance for Husbands

According to some statistics seen somewhere or other tlie favourite marriage age is now 24 for men and 23 for women. This is cheering news. Those young men will have a sporting chance. A bachelor who had kept his eyes open and thought hard once gave it as his considered opinion that “You marry a girl and live with a woman.” That is quite enough handicap for any man, without any further complications of difference in age. At 24 a man is a match, in every sense, for .a woman of his own age. Calmed from the iierce unreasonableness of youth, he still possesses enough egotism to hold his own in that amiable wrangling which is the stuff out of which the most successful marriages are made. The woman older than her mate is too conscious of the weakness of her position to risk it by unwise selfishness. Common prejudice gives her a hard row to hoe, and she is too well aware of the want of sympathy which will greet her failure to scamp the hoeing. Incidentally, she often makes a very passable job of it. Odds Against the Husband But in all other cases the odds are against the husband. The “woman, dog, and walnut tree” adage is much too crude as it stand*, but contaii'% the grain of truth that an exacting husband makes the best wife. Ac exacting job gets the best out of anybody, and the chief job of most women is a husband. Soft jobs are no good to anybody, and a husband 10 years older than herself is a soft job for any woman. It was ever the way of a woman to trade on her weaknesses, and being 10 years younger ft a weakness no woman is angelic enough not to take advantage of. Those 10 years have been spent by the man in learning to put up with

second bests —landladies, for example. He is never allowed to forget the lesson. Of all the men I have known with,! wives a good deal younger, I can truthfully say that the way they wore their hair was the only thing in which they were allowed to please themselves, and they were thankful for that. They were conceded a favourite easy chair as a sop to the “Let sleeping dogs lie” theory, and kept supplied with food and drink, of a sort, on a similar basis of “I wouldn’t let an animal starve, but I believe in keeping them in their proper place.” Amiable Wrangling But 24 married to 23 is different. He has ideas of home-making as well as she, and is prepared to make a fight for them. Hence the amiable wrangling, resulting in the combined product of two sheep’s heads, which, as everyone knows, are better than one. Their home is “how we spend our money,” whereas the home made by the others is “how I spend my husband’s money,” or—gilding the pill—“what my husband gave me.” Twenty-one wedding nineteen is also fairly common. lii 31 years’ time you will find them very devoted to each other, but of the opinion that they wouldn’t care to go through it again. They appreciate their happiness, but think it might have been won less hardly. Perhaps they are right.