It Pays to be Happily Married : Part 1

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

(Page 12 of 16)

Stanley G. Dickinson

Business believe that the happily married man will occupy a bigger position in the business world than will the man who is unhappy at home. The young men and young women in Good Housekeeping's marriage-relations course have a right to know this, to know precisely the interest which business has in harmonious marriage and the extent to which home life is a factor when men are considered for promotion, employment, or transfer - any one of which means more income, more responsibility, and an opportunity to live more fully.

Business might very logically take another view. It might believe that the single man is the better employee, because single men are free to travel, are not burdened with the expenses of a family, do not run the risk of going home to trouble. It might believe that the home experiences and environment of the people it hires are not its concern. But business is concerned with these aspects and young people should know in what way and why.

While business negotiates with the husband, it has long since learned that both husband and wife are entitled to consideration whenever one is being employed or promoted. The more important the job, the more important it becomes to determine whether husband and wife have tried to keep pace with each other, or whether there is discord at home. Business can afford to place responsibility upon the mentally capable, energetic, and tactful man if his marriage relations are harmonious. It cannot afford to gamble with the man who is in trouble at home - not necessarily vicious trouble, but trouble arising from carelessness, maladjustment, and misunderstanding.

As a business consultant advising corporations upon their major objectives and policies, I attend several times each week conferences during which men are discussed for promotion, transfer to new work or new territory, salary adjustments, and sometimes demotion. The business consultant prefers to limit his counsel to such objective matters as plans and operating policies, but this cannot be done actually, because all business situations must be resolved into the persons in them. Hence our discussion is necessarily devoted to men - to what we can do to make them more effective, to how soon we can promote them safely, to how much responsibility they can assume, to what they are best fitted for doing, and the like. During the past fifteen years, I have discussed such lowly functions as clerkships at $85 a month and such exalted positions as vice-presidencies at $20,000, with the average running between $4000 and $10,000 a year.

The judgment of executives is not infallible, and some of the men we pick are unable to measure up to the increased load we place upon them. We try to analyze these failures even more carefully than we analyze the successes. Here is what we find: in the majority of instances, men do not fail because they do not know enough, or because they are lazy; they fail because business cannot always depend upon them - they break at the wrong times. We can find men who know their work and who are capable of learning the requirements of a better job. We can find plenty of men who are willing to work, and who will work even harder for the promise of a better job in the future. But we cannot find enough men whose emotional mechanism is dependable - at least not in sufficient numbers to carry on the responsibilities which business would like to place upon them.

Peculiarly enough, the results of emotional instability are complex, but the chief cause may be defined simply: trouble at home causes more emotional upsets, more instability in business, than any other single factor. By the same token, lack of progress in business causes trouble at home. No home can be run successfully without a degree of financial progress, and such progress cannot be made - except by a negligible few - without harmony at home.

All wives have, by and large, an equal stake with their husbands in their husbands' material progress. The increased income is a major consideration, but it is only the beginning in a chain of useful consequences. Business progress means mental growth, added intelligence to be applied to both working and living. Personal growth means a fuller home life, a finer environment in which to bring up children, an opportunity to become a respected member of the community. Business progress means greater responsibility, and this breeds the ability to take on still more responsibility, both at home and in business. Progress eventually brings more leisure, more culture, and more of the other refinements of living. Progress is accelerating, feeding upon and multiplying itself.

No one would deny the truth of all this, yet only a searching few have actually created at home the degree of harmony which has been the aim of this series in Good Housekeeping's course on marriage relations. If effective contributions from home to the consistent progress of breadwinners were universal rather than rare, half of our troubles in finding men for added responsibility would be over. The majority of men dissipate their energy in wishing and wanting, but restrict themselves to wishing and wanting the result, rather than the cause. These insist that they want to better their situations, but insist also that business is a thing apart, something to be shut in the office, something which need not be understood or supported at home, and certainly something over which a wife at home has little influence. These two points of view are not reconcilable; hence everyone loses who tries to hold to both at once.

If you say to a business executive, "Business is a thing apart," he will point out at once that your theory is true only in the least important jobs. The management does not worry much about the home environment of the beginner upon whom no real responsibility rests, but it frequently goes to unbelievable ends to get its more important employees back onto the track if they have lost their heads over a home problem. Again, business does this for no humanitarian reasons; it takes this attitude because its employees produce better where there is harmony at home.

The capable, intelligent, and progressive worker is almost invariably married to a capable, intelligent, and progressive woman. Each acts and reacts upon the other. Men are not so versatile that they can fill $5000 jobs during the day and then go home to become husbands of $1500 women in the evening. Neither are women so versatile that they will remain in contented harmony with husbands who are not their mental equals. Some look negatively at the problem, feeling that "I could have done better if I had had the advantages of so-and-so." The facts are that these envied couples were growing up together, keeping pace mentally, long before the promotion came which is given the credit for their present condition.

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