How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
341/400
- 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:
are the girls whose parents have so convinced them of their
special virtues that they can find no man to suit them.
They fall in love with far-away heroes of the stage and
screen, with married men, with great characters in story¬
books and fairy tales. Theirs is the quest for the
ineluctable prince charming. Concessions to reality they
never make. In time they become critical and crabbed,
and when they are forced into marriage by social con¬
ventions or the necessity of finding someone to provide
for them—they cannot work for a living and soil their
princess hands—they revenge themselves on the poor
man they marry because he fails to come up to their
fantastic standards. The man of their choice is a composite
of Croesus, Apollo, Adonis, the handy-man from the
garage, their favourite brother, an image of their father
in his prime, Lindbergh, Dempsey, Keats, Santa Claus,
and perhaps the white-whiskered family physician thrown
in for good measure.
The romantic idealists are the people who are for ever
falling in and out of love, and dramatizing their lives
with the false sentimentality of a bad play. The psycho¬
logical nature of “ falling in love ” deserves more minute
consideration because it is so common and so generally
a mistaken technique of life. It is highly improbable that
people who “ fall in love at first sight ” in the accepted
sense of the word, ever attain a happy love life. The vast
majority of people believe that they must fall in love or be
in love before they can be happy in a sexual relation.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Occasionally a
man and a woman see each other for the first time, and
sense a feeling of complete kinship which they call falling
in love ; and, on the premise that, because love is present,
all else can be attained, they marry and live happily ever
after according to the time-honoured formula of the
story-books.
But this probably occurs with great rarity. For, as we
have explained, love is the result of years of cooperation,
of mutual enjoyment, and mutual suffering. It cannot
then, except in the most unusual cases, be the 'premise of