How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

The Aftermath of Love at First Sight Thousands upon thousands of otherwise intelligent young people fall in love for similarly inconsequential reasons, equally romantic, equally quixotic, equally inauspicious for the happy conduct of a marital relation. If our young lady were to induce the ship’s officer to follow the course she had decided upon, and if he were to marry her after a brief but furious courtship, the great probability is that she would wake up one fine morning to realize with horror that she had a stranger in bed with her. She would find that, despite the physical similarity to her beloved father, the purser was a hard-drinking, rather brutal, and inconsiderate man, perfectly incapable of talking to her about art and literature, her two greatest interests in life, and completely incapable of meeting her friends socially. Then another love tragedy would begin. And another broken heart and two broken lives could be chalked up to the credit of romantic infantilism. It is quite probable that our young woman would not give up with the first flush of chagrin. She would carry out that second time-honoured formula of the romantic idealists : “ Because I love you, you must do what I say ! ” The ship’s officer would then be nagged to give up chewing tobacco, drinking grog, and the like. We do not believe that these are the most admirable traits of human conduct, but they are G.’s traits. Our young lady could have noticed them from the very beginning if she had not been hypnotized by “ falling in love ” to leave all her intellectual faculties at home. She has received her just deserts. No one can marry a person for some single fetishism, such as grey hair, a booming laugh, a good complexion, tall stature, or beautiful feet, and expect that the rest of the personality will somehow fit in ! English people look with horror at the arranged marriages of certain foreign peoples, in which the love of the young people for one another is considered a wholly secondary matter, the social, economic, intellectual, political, or religious factors being considered more