December 29, 1922.
ADVICE TO THE MARRYING.
About the most utterly useless, palpably unnecessary labor that can be performed is to give young people advice about marrying----and the utter uselessness and palpably unnecessity of it is more vividly emphasized when the advice is given in a specific case to a young woman about what sort of man the particular --- and what young woman about to marry is not "particular"? ---- young woman in question should not marry.
A Brooklyn minister, well-meaning and evidentally given much to correct theorizing and as patently lacking in accurate experience with young human nature, has offered to the young women and older girls in his territory some advice as to what sort of man they should not marry.
He said: Don't marry a man -----
Whom you don't know thoroughly.
Whom you expect to reform.
Who doesn't respect womanhood.
Who is unpopular with children and other men.
Who can't support you.
Who hasn't a sense of humor.
Who has been wild.
Don't marry a man unless he is about the same age and has the same interests as yourself.
Don't marry a man unless there is intelligent love on both sides.
One commentator pungently remarked that he might have saved the amplification and merely left it, "Don't marry a man" ---He might have condensed it still further and said, "Don't marry!" That's what it amounts to. The girl could hardly find a man, as sorry as most of them maybe, who was all the several things the preacher declares he should not be ---- if there were perfect men women would tire of them unspeakably.
The last item on the list intimates that the reverend doctor has studied far away from his own warm-hearted days if he ever had them. "Intelligent love on both sides"----it is to grin broadly! There is no such thing as intelligent love on one side. There may be intelligence and there may be love and both may at proper times and occasionally almost simultaniously occupy the identical personality, but every intelligent person who has been in love knows that seat of the affections is in the heart and the alleged location of the center of the intellect is in the brain. Nor will the heart always be controlled by the head.
The warning is not marry a man who has been wild --- it is better to turn him down cold and let him go wild again and prove that you shouldn't marry at all. Girls are warned not to marry men to reform them --- and that is one piece of sensible piece of advice, albeit it is vainly given in most cases. No man ever marries a girl to reform her and really the girls should not be asked to do what a husky, sure-handed man will not attempt. But the funniest item in the "don't" of the preacher is, "Don't marry a man you don't know thoroughly." Ask any precious old woman friend of yours who has just celebrated, say, her golden anniversary, confidentally to tell you if she has in fifty years of constant study ever come to half-understand her old man for even half the time and remember what she says!
The Brooklyn minister wasted mighty good advice. He must have been honest, or else he was assured that his advice would never be followed --- for if the young women of his flock should heed his words his fees from wedding ceremonies would certainly show a slump from this time forward.
Savannah Morning News, as reprinted in the Wrightsville Headlight.
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