Whispers for Brides-to-Be...

The girl grows up and opens her eyes upon the lights of life; she sees them as pictures on the screen, or as plays that fill her imagination with hopes and wishes, and she yearns to take up her part on the stage. Here begins her striving to enter the living, unbroken procession... The girl of today is like a bee in springtime, moving from the mouth of one flower to another, sipping the sweetest nectar and the most delicious honey; yet not one of these honeyed confections prepared in the workshops of modern refinement and in today's schools teaches her the thing she needs most of all — namely, how to become a housewife in the days to come.

Yes, she is a bride, and here she is offering her allegiance to the companion of her tomorrow. Here she leaves the world of fancy to enter reality; but her steps grow heavy, and her feet make her feel a violent pinching! For every one of the women around her presses her opinions and counsels upon her, and she believes that herein lies the complete lesson, which begins with the darning of stockings and ends with weighty matters of the soul. But this stream of guidance and counsel dries up suddenly after the wedding, to take another course upon the tongue of her mother or her mother-in-law; and since this current must run on for a period of nearly twenty years, the woman, matters standing so, must take her position with knowledge and good sense, and look into her affairs with awareness and reflection. The advisers do not notice the signs that cannot be hidden on the girl's face, nor her want of assurance on some point; they go on talking, offering their words with no care for how far their effect will carry, nor any knowledge of how wide the halo of that echo will spread. They pass from one subject to another, avoiding the most important subject of all — the one she is bound to have come upon in her many readings, fanciful at times and harshly realistic at others. So she feels she commands a knowledge that her mother lacked on her own wedding day; she has tasted, in modern literature, the flavor of strange surprises, and has come to hope that life will surprise her with what she awaits; and she has found no one to turn her from her fixed idea — the one that fills her inmost self with doubt and confusion — no one to persuade her that she ought to be at ease and enjoy the pleasures of her present life.

Every girl chooses a rule upon which to center her married life once the honeymoon is over. In sifting these counsels, we find that the best of them come very often from obscure sources, and that in the scraps we pay no heed to lie precious values. Here is a selection of counsels from various personalities truly aware of themselves; they may seem strange and startling, but experience has shown how great their benefits are...

1 — Learn to accept advice graciously: giving is as easy as taking, and if you have no need of what is offered you, pass it on to someone else, without troubling yourself to look for the giver; and if the gift should return by chance to its source, let that be no occasion for anger, but for appreciation of you and acknowledgment of your consummate wisdom.

2 — Do not put in your curling pins before you kiss your husband good night: no man can feel whole-hearted tenderness toward a head of thorns.

3 — Comb your hair and wash your face before breakfast and before you take your coffee, for a man falls into doubt and bewilderment when he cannot tell his wife's face from the creases of his pillow.

4 — Do not touch the razor, and do not tidy your husband's table. These are things to avoid; for a man knows the razor to be a genuine and sacred emblem which a woman may not use, even to cut a thread she has used to sew a button on his shirt, or to sharpen a pencil of his. So too his private table: he very often leaves the lists and papers scattered about in a far from satisfactory fashion — beware of setting about restoring them to order without his consent.

5 — Do not go to sleep upon a quarrel: the dispute swells before morning until it brings you to an end you will not be thankful for. This rule is easy to follow, within reasonable limits; if your husband feigns drowsiness, it is not wise to renew the conversation. Rather set this maxim before you: "Let the drowsy eye sleep."

6 — If your child and your husband call you at the same moment, go to your husband first — having made certain that the child is not dangling over the edge of the cradle.

7 — Be generous with your own money and your own time, not with what is his of these. A woman will give up an important engagement merely from a feeling that some other destination is to be preferred; that feeling melts away when she discovers she has thrown away the chance of the gain and the quarry her husband had been counting on. Nor will his welcome be doubled when she offers his help, of her own accord, as a donation to the town club; or when, hearing that a friend of hers is ill and in need of blood, she gives her own blood, and the type does not match the patient's, so she runs to her husband asking him to be generous with his — which naturally does not please him.

8 — Do not try to change your husband: whether you admit it or not, you married him for his faults, not in spite of them. If his shyness pleased you before the wedding, do not be astonished at its disappearance afterward. Strength and virtue are among the noblest of a man's qualities — but imagine them standing erect before you at the breakfast table every day. Grown people, like the young, are most lovable in their hours of weakness, when they feel the need of one another's help. There are those who say children should be treated like grown-ups; but the reverse of this theory fits better — they should be dealt with indulgently, not scolded and criticized.

9 — Do not compete with your husband: if you lose, you feel scattered and shaken; and if you win, you feel, in place of the pleasure of victory, the pricks of this remark flung by whoever happens to be near: "Whatever did she see in him?" But if compete you must, always arrange to win once and lose once — keeping the first a secret and publishing the second.

10 — Do not grumble if he presses you to make pastries like those his mother used to make him: by doing so you make him pay the dues your father paid. It is most probable that a man wants his wife to be a portrait of his mother; and no less true is the woman's unending effort to cast her husband in her father's mold, even should he count that an impossible extreme. It is understood that man and woman each labor to stir the other with every sort of emotional agitation; and even if both succeed, it does not seriously content her. The pity of it is that our culture makes no provision for a trial marriage between the bride's father and the bridegroom's mother, which would settle these problems that are nothing but a waste of time.

11 — Remember that marriage is a game; were it not so, it would never have spread as it has. Those who join in this game grow more numerous every day than the players of football and tennis. Some suppose it a game more widespread among women than among men, but the statistics contradict this supposition: there has not yet been a single year in which the number of women marrying exceeded that of the men.