Age-old advice: Quiet husband is likely to make for dull marriage

We mine the Free Press archives for advice that still applies today (...or doesn’t)

By: Dorothy Dix Posted: 3:00 AM CST Thursday, Jan. 17, 2019

From Dorothy Dix’s Letter Box, published in the Manitoba Free Press on Feb. 2, 1927 Dear Miss Dix: When I first started going with my young man friend we indulged in kissing in order to entertain ourselves, rather than sit up in silence, for he simply can’t carry on a conversation. I have to do all the talking, and he doesn’t even try to help, but I’m tired and disgusted with all of this petting, and want to quit it. Yet I like this boy and hate to give him up. What would you advise? –Jeanette

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/01/2019 (2836 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

From Dorothy Dix’s Letter Box, published in the Manitoba Free Press on Feb. 2, 1927

Dear Miss Dix: When I first started going with my young man friend we indulged in kissing in order to entertain ourselves, rather than sit up in silence, for he simply can’t carry on a conversation. I have to do all the talking, and he doesn’t even try to help, but I’m tired and disgusted with all of this petting, and want to quit it. Yet I like this boy and hate to give him up. What would you advise? –Jeanette

Answer: Well, if I were you, Jeanette, I should gently waft my kissing bug out into the air. For, believe me, my child, matrimony is a sure cure for petting, and if the only parlour trick your young man possesses is kissing, he is due to make a mighty dull husband to the woman who is unlucky enough to get him.

Don’t marry a man who can’t talk, and out of whom every remark has to be corkscrewed. A dumb husband is as depressing an object as you can have around the house. He may not really be glum and grouchy, but he always gives that impression, and anyway a wife can do nothing with him because she never knows what he thinks. She never knows whether he is pleased or displeased, and she can never guess what he is going to do, nor has she the slightest inkling of his plans. No wife can establish any sort of comradeship with a silent husband.

An advertisement for the opening of the Princess Rose Room in the 1927 Manitoba Free Press. Today, no such address exists; the location would be on Portage Avenue at Smith Street, between the Manitoba Property Registry and the Radisson Hotel. The last reference to the Princess Rose Room in our archives was a note about a curling party held there in 1940.

Further, a dumb husband is like a douche of cold water. You can’t rouse him to any enthusiasm over anything; you can never have any happy times talking things over together, and building air castles about all the wonderful things you are going to do when your ship comes in. And half the joy in being married comes in that.

He never pays you a compliment. He never tells you that you look pretty or that he likes your new hat, or that you can make better biscuits than his mother can, and so you will go starving for a little praise all of your days.

And you will never have the bliss of having him tell you that he loves you, and that his guardian angel must have been working overtime when he got you for a wife. It won’t be any satisfaction to you to know that he is probably thinking all sorts of wonderful things about you.

The greatest menace to domestic life, Jeanette, is boredom. The reason that most husbands and wives who to astray wander from their own fireside is because they were simply bored stiff by the women and men to whom they were married.

Therefore, they start to hunt up somebody who could entertain them, somebody who was interesting, somebody who carried a nifty line of chatter about the news of the day and books and music and theatres and neighbourhood gossip.

So, really in picking out a husband, about the most important thing to look for is his ability to entertain you, to keep you amused and interested, and feeling that you could listen to him forever without getting tired of him. Don’t marry a man until you find one of this caliber.

“A dumb husband is as depressing an object as you can have around the house… Further, a dumb husband is like a douche of cold water.”

Pick out a glib talker, a man who loves the sound of his own voice, a man who can tell a good story, who gathers up all the little interesting incidents of the day and relates them gaily. That kind of man makes the sort of husband who chatters across the dinner table to his wife, and doesn’t sit up like a graven image of an evening and only grunt when he is asked a question.

Don’t marry a man who can only entertain you by kissing you, because he won’t kiss you after marriage. He will just give you a peck on the cheek as he passes by.