Group Therapy - Advice Columns From the Vault: July 21, 2005

Thursday, July 21, 2005

HOW TO CHOOSE A HUSBAND

by Beatrix Fairfax

The Mansfield News, Thursday, March 29, 1917

Nowadays we women folk choose our careers with a great deal of sanity and after much consideration. I wonder if we bring as much consideration to the greatest careers of all--Wifehood and Motherhood.

Most of us know that the future of the race depends on us, but we seem to think that knowing accomplishes our whole duty and the practical realization is of no importance whatever.

Because we are clever stenographers whose fingers click with expert precision and speed over the keys of typewriters, and whose eyes and minds read back our own notes accurately, do we conclude that those same agile fingers are fit to interpret Chopin or Brahms and the eyes can be guaranteed to work out the intricacies of Liszt and read his notes? Oh, no; we say to ourselves: "Hurray! I'm an expert stenographer. I have found my niche and my career and the things for which I am suited. I shall make the most of it."

And having brought intelligence to the selection of our work, we go ahead and make the most of it.

But when it comes to choosing the life work of wifehood and motherhood, we are all likely to rush in and marry a pair of broad shoulders topped by a pleasing face and a broad forehead which houses no thought in tune with our own.

Don't Trust Appearances

Eyes and heart and mind have to work together if a woman expects her marriage to be complete. The fact that a man tells a joke well doesn't mean that he is going to be an interesting life companion. The individual who leads you beautifully and without jar through a waltz may not be as successful when you join forces with him and try walking the path of life. And the blue-eyed Apollo who delights your eyes may revolt your whole nature when you come into close contact with him.

The man who gambles or drinks to excess, and who has gambled or drunk to excess through ten or fifteen years of his life is not going to reform just because a woman asks. If he never had the mental stamina or the moral force to pull himself up short, no woman ought to take on the job of making him over new, unless he first prove his fitness to be her life partner by making himself over new.

The philanderer, the maker of light love, the man without respect for woman or child, is attainted, and that taint is bound to poison the life of the woman who gives herself into his keeping.

No woman ought to marry a man unless she is sure that he is physically as well as morally fit to be the father of her children.

In choosing a husband, health, strong character, high purpose and steady aim are of paramount importance. Kindness and congeniality make the life partner a being with whom one can live happily. Ability to make money is far more important than the possession of it. A man who does not drink, who does not loiter in the pathway of giddy pleasures and who has the reliability and common sense to work along practically in a practical world is going to be a far better provider than the ease-loving inheritor of a fortune.

Unselfishness, honor, temperance in all things, capability of tender affection--all of these are far more likely to guarantee happiness than an ability to murmur sweet nothings.

Not a Path of Thrills

Life is not a matter of thrills. It is instead an affair of prosaic, everyday details. To live side by side with a man day in and day out is not going to be a very comfortable matter if he is a "Great Lover" who cannot take care of you, and an Adonis who makes no effort to be honest with you, or a weakling you cannot respect.

Gentleness and strength, firmness of character and willingness to listen to advice; a strong sense of direction and a keen perception of the rights of others make a Real Man. Be sure that the man you marry is a Real Man--not a lovable, fascinating unreliable boy.

Insure the rights of your children and of your own future by marrying none but a man who brings you clean, untainted health. Unselfishness--which covers kindness and fairness and tenderness and a sturdy willingness to remember that you are in individual with a personality of your own--is the next great need of the woman who is choosing her mate.

And your life partner must interest you, he must be congenial, he must think along lines which stimulate you to thought, and must enjoy the fillip your ideas give to his imagination.

If such a man be temperate, reliable and honest, and have well-balanced common sense, marriage with him will bring you deep joy, ever-widening happiness and glimpses of life's greatest heights.

Beatrice Fairfax is the pen name of Marie Manning, who penned America’s first write-in advice column on July 20, 1898 for William Randolph Hearst's “New York Evening Journal.” The column was an instant success, and in the following decades, both Manning and others wrote under the pen name Beatrice Fairfax.