How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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to believe he was responsible for all important decisions, although she knew very well that she had made the decision for him weeks ago, and waited confidently for her husband to announce her opinion with the air of a God-like and spontaneous discovery. And I have seen other marriages wrecked because the wife objected to her husband’s technique at bridge, or insisted that he did not know how to mix cocktails, hang pictures, or choose the proper ties to match his shirts. Examples of this type of mental unhappiness could be multiplied indefinitely, but they lead to no general rules of conduct beyond those we have already outlined. The best counsel is : try to know your mate before you marry him, but once having married him, take him for what he is, and make the best of it. Men who marry prostitutes to make good women of them, and women who marry drunkards, morphine addicts, inveterate golfers,. or gamblers with the intention of reforming them, get just what they deserve—insults to their vanity. For them marriage becomes a veritable hotbed of neuroses. Marriages and love affairs will continue to be unhappy until we remove the fallacies of the omnipotence of romantic passion from the thought vocabulary of our children, and until we institute objective training in the art of love, and teach men and women that they must be responsible for their emotions and their erotic passions just as they are responsible for curbing other anti-social tendencies in their behaviour. Much of the difficulty of our love-life is directly due to the fact that the vast majority of our young people cannot make love in decent surroundings. We continue to blind our eyes to the immense social value of love, and treat it as if it were a foul sin, instead of the highest form of human cooperation. WTe need never fear that there will be too much love. The world suffers only from too little love.