How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
322/400
- Publication/creation
- London : George Routledge, 1932.
- Physical description
- xiv, 374 pages ; 22 cm
- Contributors
- Wolfe, W. Béran 1900-1935.
- Notes
-
This edition was reprinted in 1933, 1934, 1935, 1937, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1946 and 1948.
Copy 1 Note: 1937 reprint. X158203
- Attribution and usage
-
Wellcome Collection
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The image contains the following text:
aspect of mankind’s ignorance of its meanings. There
are many young men who mistakenly marry because of
the opportune licence to indulge in sexual relations
without let or hindrance, while as many young women
mistakenly marry as if marriage in itself were the
complete solution of all their problems.
Marriage is both a task and a contract whose solution and
f ulfilment require long and assiduous preparation. Tackling a
major problem can never be the solution of a minor
problem. You cannot cure neurotic traits by marriage,
because love does not grow well in neurotic soil, and if the
contracting parties are neurotic, marriage intensifies
rather than minimizes their difficulties. Women who
marry simply to make sure of someone to provide their
meals for them generally get just what they have bargained
for, but, in the great majority of instances, bitter bread is
their fare. Men who marry in order to have a convenient
and inexpensive substitute for a combination nurse and
housekeeper, get just what they want—-at best a faithful
slave, at worst a nagging kitchenmaid who makes their
lives unbearable because of her insistence on the
importance of trivialities. Some women marry the first
attachable male simply because they desire freedom from
the solicitude of parents, only to find, in a day or a year,
that they have married a man and not a pair of wings, a
human being and not a mode of escape from their
difficulties.
Similar cases of ignorance of the meaning of marriage
could be duplicated without end. In all of them the same
basic fallacy, that marriage is a cure or an escape from this
or that intolerable situation, can be found at the bottom
of the subsequent failure. It is in marriages in which
the true nature of the marriage contract has never been
understood that we find the conversion neuroses of
dyspareunia, sexual incompatibility, frigidity, and
impotence growing like rank weeds. But so long as we
learn about love from the sentimental novels written by
frustrated spinsters or amorous but impotent bachelors,
and so long as we educate our children to believe that