Age-old advice: Strategic insults

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/12/2016 (3488 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dorothy Dix Letter Box, published June 23, 1931

Dear Miss Dix – I am a married man with two children. Have been married ten years to a very good wife, who is thrifty and industrious and a fine cook and makes me a very happy home.

She is a very pretty little thing, trim and neat, but I never pay her a compliment because I am afraid if I do it will swell her head and she might get the idea of stepping out. When she asks me how she looks I always hand her a knock and tell her that something is wrong.

I know she has had the blues about this many a time, and she always looks so hurt and discouraged when I tell her that I don’t like her dress or that she is getting old or something.

Lately, however, I have found out that she has been stepping out with a nice-looking young man, and I have wondered if he has been telling her the things she longed to hear from me.

Do all women get a wild streak after they have been married a while? Should I leave her or forgive her for the children’s sake?

-Worried Husband

Answer: You should find it easy enough to forgive her, but I don’t see how you can ever forgive yourself for being such a stupid ass as to drive her into jumping the home bars in search of some food on which to feed her starving soul.

Your wife is young, pretty and attractive. She craves admiration and attention. She yearns to be flattered and jollied, and all she gets from you is criticism and fault-finding and neglect. Other men offer her the appreciation you deny her. Can you blame her for turning a willing ear to the soft talk that she hears abroad and that she never gets at home? As well blame a hungry cat for lapping up the saucer of cream that is handed to it.

I often wonder what men think their wives are made of that they dare treat them as they do. They must believe that they have married creatures of superhuman virtue who are beyond all mortal temptations and desires and who are content to live an austere life doing their duty for duty’s sake. Else husbands would not expect their wives to be content to stay penned up in a stony and barren home corral when outside there were green fields and new pastures in which they could disport themselves.

There are plenty of men like you, Worried Husband. Men who are married to young women and pretty women and women who take a pride in their appearance. Women who work hard and try to please their husbands. Before marriage these women had plenty of suitors. They were accustomed to being told how beautiful and wonderful they were and to having men notice their pretty frocks and compliment them upon them. They were used to having men make love to them and probably they chose for a husband the man who had the most saccharine line of sweet talk. Naturally, they expected him to keep it up.

But to their amazement marriage changed all of that. Husbands dropped love-making at the altar with a suddenness that jarred their back teeth loose. He exchanged the salve-spreader for the hammer, and his only comment on anything they did was to find fault with it.

There are thousands upon thousands of wives in the world whose husbands never pay them a compliment, who never say one word of love to them, who never show them any tenderness, who never give them a kiss that isn’t an insult, it is such a perfunctory kiss of duty, and who can only surmise that their husbands still have some degree of affection for them because they haven’t divorced them.

No woman in the world is satisfied or happy with that kind of husband. Every woman hungers and thirsts for tenderness and appreciation, and it is no wonder that a few women who are starved for love steal it when they cannot get it any other way. The amazing thing is that there are not more unfaithful wives than there are.

Put this in your pipe, Mr. Man, and smoke it: When a man quits making love to a young and pretty wife, some other man is apt to begin. So, if you want to keep your wife, keep yourself a lover.