"A Guide to Men" by Helen Rowland - 09 - Widowers (Fourth Interlude)

WIDOWERS THE tenderest, most impressionable thing on earth is the heart of a yearling widower. Of course it is easier to marry a widower than a bachelor. A man who has been through the Armageddon of one marriage has no spirit of battle left in him. When a widow begins curling her hair, again, or a widower begins worrying about his thinness on top, Cupid chuckles and gets out his arrows and Satan smiles behind his hand. In the matrimonial market a seasoned bachelor is just a shop-worn remnant; a divorcé is a cast-off, second-hand article; but a widower is a treasured heirloom inherited only through death. After his wedding day, a man usually tucks all the flattering adjectives and tender nothings in his vocabulary away in a pigeon-hole and marks them "Not to be opened until widowerhood."[90] Perhaps there may not be so much excitement in marrying a widower; but there is a lot more comfort in getting something that another woman has broken to double harness than in lashing yourself to a bucking bronco fresh from the wild. No matter how unhappy a man may have been with his first wife nothing on earth will make him flatter her successor by acknowledging that she was not a combination of Circe, St. Cecilia and the Venus di Milo. The girl who marries a widower may be a sort of "second edition," but the girl who marries a seasoned bachelor is apt to be a forty-second edition. When a widower vows he will "never marry again," listen for the wedding bells! The "Never-agains" are the easiest fruit in the Garden of Love. It's the "Never-at-alls!" who are harder than a newsboy's conscience, colder than yesterday's kiss, and less impressionable than a boarding-house steak.[91] If a woman could foresee how irresistible her husband would look with a bereaved expression on his face and a black band on his coat sleeve, it would give her the strength to live forever. Some widowers are bereaved-others, relieved. A man may forget all about how to make love during ten years of matrimony, but it's wonderful how quickly he can brush up on the fine points again after he becomes a widower. FOURTH INTERLUDE A MAN always looks at a woman through either the right or the wrong end of a telescope, and thus always sees her as a divinity or a devil-never as a human being. Business girl's motto: "Better marry and be a poor man's slave than stay single and be a rich man's stenographer." When a clever girl lets fly the arrows of wit she should be careful to see that a man's vanity is not the bull's eye. It is difficult for a man to reconcile a girl's absorbing interest in picture-hats, pearl powder, and Paquin models with real brains; but somehow his own enthusiasm for baseball and golf never seems to him incompatible with superior intelligence. Don't fancy your husband has ceased to love you merely because he no longer seems to notice your presence around the house; wait until he gets so that he doesn't even notice your absence.[93] A good husband is one who will get up and lift the ice off the dumbwaiter instead of lying back and lifting his voice to tell you how to do it without "hurting your itsy bitsy fingers." The shallower a man's love, the more it bubbles over into eloquence. When his emotions go deep, words stick in his throat, and have to be hauled out of him with a derrick. To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little; to be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all. A man with savoir faire may scintillate in a crowd, but it takes a "bashful man" to shine in a dim cozy corner. Every bride fancies that she married the original "cave-man" until she tries to persuade him to go out and argue with the furniture-movers.[94] What a man calls his conscience in a love affair is merely a pain in his vanity, the moral ache that accompanies a headache, or the mental action that follows a sentimental reaction. It never pays to compromise! Cheap clothes, cheap literature, cheap sports, cheap flirtations-a life filled with these is nothing but an electric flash, advertising "something just as good." Just at first, every man seems to fancy that it takes nothing but brute force and determination to run an automobile or a wife; after the smash-up he changes his mind. Brains and beauty are an impossible combination in a woman-not necessarily impossible to find, but impossible to live with. When a woman looks at a man in evening dress, she sometimes can't help wondering why he wants to blazon his ancestry to the world by wearing a coat with a long tail to it.[95] When a man says he loves you don't ask him "Why," because by the time he has found his reason he will undoubtedly have lost his enthusiasm. Pshaw! It is no more reasonable to expect a man to love you tomorrow because he loves you today, than it is to assume that the sun will be shining tomorrow because the weather is pleasant today. Sending a man a sentimental note, just after he has spent the evening with you, has about the same thrilling effect as offering him a sandwich, immediately after dinner. A "good woman," according to Mrs. Grundy, is one who would scorn to sacrifice society for the sake of a man but will cheerfully sacrifice the man she marries for the sake of society. The flower of a man's love is not an immortelle, but a morning-glory; which fades the moment the sun of a woman's smiles becomes too intense and glowing.[96] The sweetest part of a love affair is just before the confession when you begin discussing love in the abstract and gazing concretely into one another's eyes. Marriage is a photogravure made from the glowing illusions which Love has painted on the canvas of the heart. A woman may have to reach heaven before she tastes supernal joy; but to taste supreme punishment she has only to watch the love-mist die out of a man's eyes. Nothing frightens a man like a woman's stony silence. Somehow in spite of his lack of intuition, he has a subconscious premonition that her love is dead when she is too weary and disinterested to "answer back." The satisfaction in flattering a man consists in the fact that, whether you lay it on thick or thin, rough or smooth, a little of it is always bound to stick.[97] Love is a furnace in which the man builds the fire, and forever afterward expects the woman to keep it glowing, by supplying all the fuel. The gods must love summer flirtations-they die so young. A man may have heart enough to love more than one woman at a time, but unless he is a fatalist he should have brains enough not to try it. When love dies a wise married couple give its ashes a respectful burial, and hang a good photograph of it on the wall for the benefit of the public.