A MYSTERY.
"I desire to come face to face with the person or persons who are
controlling and influencing my husband against his home and children and
myself. He has been estranged from us all for several years, although
sleeping under the same roof. Once I can find out the person or cause of
his actions I can remove the effect, for I shall know just what to do. I
want to solve the mystery."
The chances are you will never find that out, and if you did it would
do you absolutely no good. Your husband is no dumb fool to be
"influenced" this way or that by two women! He is a man with ideas of
his own. If he was disappointed in you as wife, he has possibly turned
to some other woman. If so the more you pry and suspect and hint around,
the more positively he will turn away from you. If you "found out" and
made things warm for him or another he would simply hate and despise you
and be the harder set against you. This is the Law.
The thing for you to do is to recognize your husband's RIGHT to make and
answer for his own mistakes. Then drop the whole thing from your mind
and calculations.
Then treat your husband as you would any man who came to visit you. Make
yourself as attractive and cultured and agreeable as possible, and look
out for his comfort, but never get in his way nor question his doings.
Stand square up on your own feet and be as fine a woman as you know how
to be--as gracious a one. If he does love some other woman it may be but
a temporary infatuation and if you are attractive and kind and sensible
and independent enough he may return to his first love in his own
good time.
If not, why, no matter. Just you get interested in life on your own
account and let him do as he will. If he does care for another woman he
deserves credit for not deserting you, as many a man would have done.
Just respect and honor him for the good that is in him, instead of
condemning him mentally because the good does not show just according to
your ideas of how it should.
Love does not stay put, no matter how hard folks try to keep it put.
All we can do is to be as lovable as possible and thus do our part to
_attract_ love.
It may be that you are simply a sentimental goose who imagines her
husband is "influenced" away from her, because, forsooth, he does not
pay her the attentions he used to.
I was once that kind of a goose myself, and it widened a breach that did
not then exist except in my mind; widened it until at last it became a
real breach--my husband went elsewhere for his companionship. I was too
morbid and finicky and exacting for a healthy man.
Just as the husband of the woman in "Confessions of a Wife," in
_Century_ did. I read that serial each month and feel like shaking that
little simpleton!--she is just the kind of a sentimental hair-splitting
little idiot that I used to be! Instead of getting at her husband's
point of view and enjoying _with_ him, at least sometimes, she insists
on acting the martyr because he will not dawdle around and gush at
her feet.
Whatever is the cause of your trouble the only cure for it is
Common-Sense. Live your own life, cheerily, happily, and enter into your
husband's life so far as you can. Take all the good things that come
your way and rejoice in them, but don't moon around and fuss because you
can't have the sort of love-life described in some sentimental novel.
Your business in life is to LOVE, not to _be_ loved. The latter is a
secondary matter and the first is the thing that brings happiness to
you. Go in to win now, and you can develop within yourself the full Life
that you really desire. All you desire is yours and you will realize it
in due time. But every moment you set your thought on straightening out
Some Other body's life you are delaying your own realization and
happiness.