maketh the heart dead.
The most unfair, last word to describe religious faith is the word
anesthetic. Religious faith is a comfort to the old, the sick, and the
suffering; but in general it is not a sedative, it is a tonic. It is a
dynamo; it is a driving force. Henry Drummond, the most effective
speaker on religion I can remember, said to a group of students: "I ask
you to become Christians not because you may die tonight but because you
are going to live tomorrow. I come not to save your souls, but to save
your lives."
Religion adds an enormous zest to daily life; it makes everything
interesting. It keeps alive the capacity of wonder. I myself am
interested in everything in the world, from a sandlot ball game to the
nebula in Orion. The mainspring of my existence, the foundation of my
happy and exciting life, is Christian faith.
I suggest to those recently married and those about to be married that
they are entering into a relationship that can bring them the highest
and most lasting happiness or the most crushing disillusion and despair.
Such a relationship is particularly remarkable because of its intimacy,
an intimacy far transcending that of friendship, love of parents, or any
earthly emotion. As Thomas Hardy said, marriage annihilates reserve. In
this amazing intimacy every care should be taken to insure success. A
common interest in religion, saying prayers together, will help
enormously toward increasing and preserving happiness.
For a true belief in the Christian religion will improve daily manners.
Husband and wife will not take each other for granted; they will not
become stodgy or commonplace or stereotyped.
Tennyson gave in "The Princess" the real kind of marriage which one of
my students described in the vernacular: "I am going to be married. It
won't be much of a wedding, but it will be a wonderful marriage." Listen
to Tennyson:
"For woman is not undevelopt man,
But diverse. Could we make her as the man,
Sweet Love were slain; his dearest bond is this,
Not like to like, but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words."
A wife may be a civilizing force; this is well. But she may be far more
than that. She may be a revelation in daily intimacy more unconsciously
impressive than a professional saint.
This is what _Caponsacchi_ said of an imagined union with _Pompilia_, in
Browning's "The Ring and the Book":
"To live, and see her learn, and learn by her,
Out of the low obscure and petty world--
Or only see one purpose and one will
Evolve themselves i' the world, change wrong to right;
To have to do with nothing but the true,
The good, the eternal--and these, not alone
In the main current of the general life,
But small experiences of every day,
Concerns of the particular hearth and home:
To learn not only by a comet's rush
But a rose's birth, not by the grandeur, God,
But the comfort, Christ."
_Stanley G. Dickinson_
CHAPTER ELEVEN
_It Pays to be Happily Married_
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.
When a wife falls down on her part of the job, neglecting either harmony
or her personal development, her husband's first natural reaction is to
separate his business from his home life--to grit his teeth and go on,
hoping to achieve the impossible. This usually sets up a vicious circle
of events. Being handicapped in personal effectiveness, he spends more
and more time at business. His home goes to ruin; he suffers the most
dangerous emotional upsets; his work fails, and conditions get worse and
worse. He breaks, in short, at the wrong time--a time inconvenient to
business, to put it brutally.
It is dangerous to generalize here, because there is a fine distinction
between harmony at home and bringing business into the home. Hasty
thinking is likely to confuse the two. The man who takes petty troubles
of the routine day home to his wife is a weakling, and business cannot
consider him for increased responsibility. The husband who takes none of
his problems home is frequently a mystery to his wife, but he probably
feels that she is not sufficiently informed to be useful in helping him
make decisions on purely business issues. Wives sometimes rebel against
this, because they do not make the essential distinction between respect
for them as individuals and respect for their information about a
specific business question.
The soundness of the belief that wives have a specific and clearly
defined responsibility here is verified by the fact that _husbands want,
and business demands, one and the same thing_. The approach is
different, because the husbands of America are asking primarily for
harmony at home, while business is looking for an efficient producer;
yet they both are seeking the same thing. The husband asks his wife for
harmony at home and a progressive instinct so that she will grow
concurrently with him. Business, when evaluating men for promotion, asks
whether there is harmony at home so that this man will be free from the
greatest single source of emotional unbalance, and whether this man and
his wife have demonstrated the ability to grow in the past--the best
available indication of their ability to grow in the future. These two
questions take in a lot of territory, but the ground must be covered so
long as business, in effect, employs or promotes both husband and wife.
Do not be misled for a moment respecting the importance of these two
points merely because businessmen do not talk a lot about them. Their
sense of good taste makes them hesitate to inquire bluntly into so
personal a problem, and so their investigations are conducted quietly.
Numerous confidential sources of information are used, and superiors
take their own means to meet husband and wife together, generally under
some casual pretext. If we could look behind the scenes, we would find
that emotional stability--that elusive product of a satisfactory home
environment--is regarded just as highly as knowledge, experience, or any
of the other orthodox considerations. We would find executives saying,
"We can count on Jones for Chicago now that we have seen his wife and
determined to our satisfaction that she will measure up to the
promotion" or "It's too bad we can't give this job to Smith, but you
know how hard it is to succeed without support from home." Another would
be saying, "Brown flew off the handle again yesterday; it must have
started at the breakfast table."
Wives, if you can be the Mrs. Jones of these examples, and avoid being
the Mrs. Smith or the Mrs. Brown, you will be removing for businessmen
the greatest hurdle to promotion which we encounter. You will be doing
your part as the wife of a man in business.
You may determine the extent to which you are doing these things now by
testing yourself in the light of these ten questions:
_1. Did my husband start for work this morning in a better frame of mind
for having married me, or would he have been happier as a single man or
married to someone else?_
Remember, as you ask this question and apply your own answer, that we
are talking about business; hard, practical business where intentions do
not count. You may love your husband dearly, but if the results of your
love are not constructive, you must write the word FAILURE across the
record.
_2. Do I always treat my job just as seriously as if I were working in
an office for a monthly salary?_
Some wives feel that it makes no difference if they linger so long over
bridge or cocktails or shopping or whatever in the afternoon that they
are unable to prepare a suitable meal for their husbands in the evening.
_3. Have I grown in poise and interests like the wives of my husband's
associates and superiors?_
Wives who keep up with the procession are an asset; those who fail to
grow are a liability.
_4. Can I talk in the same terms as his associates and their wives?_
This indicates how carefully you have maintained your interest in the
source of your income, and how accustomed you are to expressing
yourself.
_5. Do I dress and act like the wives of the business associates and
superiors of my husband?_
You place a heavy handicap upon your effectiveness if your husband
cannot be proud of you in the inevitable comparisons with other wives in
his organization.
_6. Do I entertain with reasonable frequency the people who are in a
position to help my husband in business, or is our social life planned
wholly for my own amusement?_
Perhaps this question should read, "How long since I have entertained
So-and-So?" You may be surprised to find that months have slipped away
without your having done a single stroke of good for your husband
socially.
_7. Do I limit our social engagements during the week to those which
will not take essential energy from the job, or do I feel that my
husband "owes" me constant amusement when he is not actually at the
office?_
As employers pile responsibility upon your husband, more and more care
must be used in the allocation of time to social affairs. You may be
able to rest the next day, but business does not permit husbands to rest
on the job.
_8. Do I act as a balance wheel, cheering him intelligently when he is
tired or discouraged, or do I rub him the wrong way on such occasions?_
If your husband does not share with you his disappointments, it is
almost invariably because you have not qualified yourself to share them.
_9. Do I try to smooth things out after unpleasant discussions--as I
would if a new dress or theatre party were at stake?_
Many married persons have an uncanny capacity for making miserable the
objects of their affection. It is said that the course of true love
never did run smooth, but the wise husband or wife will not
unnecessarily roughen it.
_10. Do I carry my share of responsibility, or do I save up all the
petty annoyances for our dinner-table conversation?_
Wives who complain that their husbands are silent during dinner have
usually good reason to overhaul the quality of their own conversation.
Don't bore him with your fight with the grocer or the catty things Mrs.
X said at bridge or afternoon tea.
Here are some actual examples of the way wives affect their husband's
business:
We selected Blake for a branch managership at Chicago, and we thought
that his wife could measure up. We took him out of a job where he had
reached his limit and placed him in one where his developed ability
might enable him to earn twice his salary. He failed. We who appointed
this man took the blame for his failure, because _business recognizes no
alibis_. As usual, it wasn't that he didn't want to be a branch manager,
or that he didn't know enough, or that he wasn't willing to work hard
enough. We found that the trouble was within his emotional mechanism. He
was losing his head and his temper at the wrong times.
At last he wrote to his firm: "This town takes the heart out of my wife.
She is terribly lonesome, refuses to make new friends, and reminds me
continually of the good times we used to have back home. Her mother
misses her and threatens to come to live with us here. I appreciate this
opportunity, and I know that we have more of everything here than we had
back home, but I want my old job back. I can't stand it here."
Business doesn't work that way, and so we persuaded another employer to
"hire him away" without his knowledge, thus saving his face and helping
to maintain his courage. He would have been branded for life if we had
permitted him to crawl back to his old job. Blake will never go as far
as he is entitled to go, because Mrs. Blake places her own feelings
above any other consideration, and her husband is not strong enough to
control his emotions where his wife is concerned. Few men are.
We do not in any way blame Mrs. Blake for the part she played in her
husband's failure. She merely attaches more value to staying in her old
groove, in the constant companionship of her mother, and in the regular
contact with old friends than she attaches to promotion for her husband.
We have no quarrel with her choice, if only she realizes that she has
chosen something for herself, and is now living under conditions
dictated by her own choice.
Take Smith. In the language of business he is a "whipped puppy." Again,
there is no question of his ability, his desires, or his willingness to
work. We have, in a certain corporation, a job for Smith which would
mean a 50 percent increase in salary, a place of notice in the
community, and a wider acquaintance among substantial people. We have
considered him for this job a dozen times, but each time we have decided
to postpone action, because we are afraid of the influence of his wife.
On his present job, it does no great damage for her to be so possessive,
demanding all his time outside of office hours, ordering him around like
a child. On the new job, such a performance would ruin him before he was
fairly started. Dare we depend on her ability and willingness to grow
quickly into the person she would have been training to become? We dare
not, for we are held responsible for results!
"Just as I thought," some will say, "business is inhuman." One who takes
this attitude has an incomplete view of the facts. If business were to
tolerate a repetition of mistakes, its general level of
productivity--which, in turn, means income to its employees--would be
lowered immediately. This would operate against the very thing we are
trying to sponsor--increased responsibility and more full living for all
as soon as they earn it.
This point of view frequently gives women no end of mental trouble,
because they are more inclined than men to think subjectively rather
than objectively. Business employs a man for what he can produce, other
things being equal. So long as he is morally sound and honest, business
cares little about his attitudes on other subjects. Wives measure their
husbands by their helping with the housework or their thoughtfulness in
little things around the home; all of these have their value, but not in
the scale of production on the job. Sentiment counts heavily with the
feminine mind, as it should, whereas business is more realistic.
Business buys results rather than intentions.
Business did not have an inherent desire to consider marriage relations.
Its interest in them began with the many examples of maladjustment to
which it was compelled to give attention, in line with its age-old
policy of believing that "everything is all right until it is proved
otherwise." When the negative consequences were brought to light, and
business really became interested, a constructive attitude was developed
which gained its momentum from the countless examples where wives have
been major reasons for the success of their husbands. Fortunately for
every failure there are a dozen successes.
The Mortons, for example, are a couple who have found that it pays to
live both harmoniously and progressively at home. Mary Morton is a
convert to the constructive attitudes brought out by the ten questions
outlined earlier. They have made it a custom to entertain at least one
evening a week, always having in mind that certain people can be _both_
good company and helpful in business. They try to reach up rather than
down in the people with whom they mingle. When they were to be
transferred to another city, the news was broken to them together in
their home by a superior. Mary's first and genuine reaction was, "It
will be fine to make new friends and to have the children see a new part
of the country."
When they arrived at the new city, the old process, so successful in
their home town, was begun again--new friends, new interests, new
growth. If they were ever homesick, the firm never found it out; but I
am inclined to believe that they were too busy on constructive matters
to get homesick. Morton's salary is three times what it was ten years
ago, and most of the credit goes to his wife. Likewise she is the chief
beneficiary.
Another illustration of the extent to which business recognizes the
principle of harmonious development of both husband and wife is shown by
the experience of Parsons. He was a junior executive, capable in every
direction but one. When a vacancy occurred higher up, he was the logical
candidate; but the president of the company refused to promote him until
he had had a chance to demonstrate his ability to meet the social
requirements of his position. He conceded Parsons' brilliance, his
energy, and everything but his capacity to become genuinely interested
in the people who were both above and beneath him in the organization.
Inquiry revealed that he was making the best of a situation in which
neither he nor his wife had realized the importance of social activity.
Bear in mind that we do not mean a playboy temperament or a mercenary
attitude, but rather a genuineness in human contacts.