Detour Around Reno : Part 4

The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book: Twelve Steps to a Happy Marriage
by Various

(Page 12 of 16)

4. Have children together if you possibly can. Have them deliberately, by mutual agreement. Have as many as your mate can wholeheartedly agree to, and throw yourselves into the great adventure of giving them the best possible start in life. Remember that the finest things you can give your children are courage, self-respect, faith, understanding of beauty, comradeship, and the eager desire to serve their fellowmen. These great endowments can be given to one's sons and daughters even though one has a severe struggle to give them good clothes and an education. Often the financially hard-pressed give their young a far richer heritage than do those who are wealthy but neglectful.

5. Understand your mate. Set about that job as though your life depended on it. Your married life and its happiness do depend on it. Understanding one's wife or husband is far more important than earning a college degree - and even more thrilling and absorbing, if one goes about it in the right way. Spend time alone, quietly, affectionately, and dispassionately thinking about your mate. What have been his great emotional experiences in life? What are the main drives that determine his ways of acting? What are his deepest aspirations and longings? What are his unrealized possibilities? What are the things that have most thwarted him and kept him from achieving what he has hoped to do?

Sometimes the process of understanding oneself and one's mate calls for expert help. Skilled marriage counselors are available increasingly in our larger cities (but be sure to go only to those who have demonstrated their skill and training by helping other people whom you know and helping them over a considerable period of time).

Sometimes magazine articles will help. Excellent books on marriage and family life are available at public libraries.

6. Discuss your vital family problems with your mate frankly, but do not argue endlessly. If there are tensions in your married life, bring them into the open, honestly and courageously. Don't try to convert your mate to your point of view; try to understand his point of view. Try to understand each other. But after you have cleared the air and shared your ideas and your problems do not rehash and repeat and go back over and over again until you are both weary and rebellious. Marriage is a partnership, not a debating society.

7. Discover areas of agreement, and develop together joint programs of action on which you can work together enthusiastically. The projects and purposes of a husband and wife often conflict even when their desires and motives are in harmony. Very well, go back of the purposes to the underlying desires, and build new projects and purposes on which you can unite. Suppose that one of you wants to go to the movie down on the corner and the other just hates the idea. Very well; that is a conflict. But if you search open-mindedly, you will probably find some underlying agreement. Perhaps, though you disagree about this particular movie, you both are craving to see some good movie; and if you look up the advertisements, you can find one that will delight you both. Or perhaps the essential desires of each will be fulfilled best if you stay home tonight to catch up on your sleep, and then go to a movie tomorrow night. Or perhaps one of you dislikes the idea of any movie at all, but both of you want to go out for the evening; then doubtless you can find some other entertainment that will satisfy both.

Somewhere, back of the surface disagreement, lies a deeper agreement if you will seek it patiently and lovingly. And this applies not only to a little dispute over movies, but to all the greater controversies that husband and wife confront. Where shall we move? How shall we get along on the family income? What religious training shall we give the children? Shall Mary be permitted to have that Jones boy come to the house? No matter how perplexing the disagreement may be, there is a best possible solution for all concerned if we will seek it understandingly and in the spirit of love.

8. Surrender nonessentials. Many a marriage has gone to smash because husband or wife or both clung as a matter of principle to a point which could easily have been given up and forgotten if both had centered on the great underlying essentials. Do not acquiesce ignobly on vital matters. But do not wreck your own happiness and that of your mate over some comparatively minor issue that was never worth the tears and the agony which it caused.

9. Agree to live and let live. Cultivate freedom for your mate, your children, and all the people involved in your family problems. To be oneself is one of the most precious rights of a human being. We need it for the fulfillment of our own life. Our loved ones need that same freedom for the fulfillment of their lives. Now, freedom is not defiance of law, but voluntary fulfillment of law. The better we understand each other and the laws of life, the more likely we are to find that freedom which brings the fullness of joy. By one of those strange paradoxes, we never fully win the love of our dear ones until we cease demanding it.

10. Put the welfare of your family first, and stop fretting about yourself. Although this rule comes last in our list, it really comes first in the search for fulfillment of personality in family life. What do you really want from your mate and your children? Are you after comfort, security, affection for yourself? Or do you want, above all things, that these loved comrades of yours shall find the road to the abundant life - shall experience richly and grow fully, until they find their true places in the master pattern of our world adventure?

Answer that question honestly. Live up to your real decision. And if with all your heart you seek the joy of these others, your love will be met with the high tide of love, and even out of anguish you will win your way into the meaning and the glory of existence.

Garden City Publishing Co. reprint edition, 1949, by special arrangement with Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Copyright, 1938, by PRENTICE-HALL, INC.