How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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Some Causes of Marital Infelicity There are manifestly very few human beings who can approach the love relationship with any such ideal equip¬ ment. When two human beings love each other they love not only each other but also the imponderable facts of their entire backgrounds and traditions. The absence of some of these desirable fundamental prerequisites is not in itself a bar to a happy marriage, because love and marriage are not fixed but movable patterns. Like the human body, the sexual community of two lovers is elastic in its possibilities of compensation. Many a couple that one might expect to be completely unhappy because of the absence of some fundamental prerequisite has managed to carry on for years of average happiness because of the mutual interest of both lovers in their children, or because of their cooperation in some social problem, ambition or avocation. We have seen couples who seemed at first sight doomed to complete failure as lovers, held together by the bonds of music, a love of horses, or a devotion to a particular cause. An amazing number of men and women choose their sexual partners as a road-maker would choose rocks to fill up a temporary hole in a road. Men expect their wives to be the complete compensation for their own defects and. inferiorities, and women choose their husbands for similar false reasons. For this reason we find apparently insane matches between brutal men and “ clinging vine ” women, between aggressive, masculinized women and effeminized gigolos, between independent and courageous men and helpless and stupid women, between athletic, physically vigorous women and dried-up bookworms, and so on. There are men and women who seek marriage with a certain mate because such a marriage offers an opportunity for quickly filling in gaps in their own personalities which they have been too cowardly to develop for themselves by adequate training, as if marrying an individual who has the desired qualities