The Marriage Book (37 page)

Know the girl’s parents before they become your parents-in-law. This may not be easy, for they may be placed on exhibition, best foot forward. In the romantic tradition of marriage, they may not seem to count, but generally they do at least appear upon the scene. In a sense you marry them in order to get the girl. All comic-strip ideas aside, parents-in-law are important because they have claims and emotional demands to make upon their children. From what has been said it follows that your father-in-law may be the kind of person you are
supposed
to be. If you don’t like that kind of person or can’t be that kind of person, it may be just too bad.

Furthermore, the girl’s parents give some idea of what she now is or is going to become. By breeding and upbringing she is a product of her parents. Suppose the mother at fifty is silly and kittenish. The daughter has a girlish gaiety suitable to one who is young and pretty, but later on will she be like her mother? Suppose the mother at fifty is a bore—the daughter may have a better start than you realize, with only some twenty-five years to go. Look at the girl’s parents for a dim preview of the future. Remember that the personalities of both parents are interwoven under the girl’s skin. She may resemble them. She may exert herself to avoid resemblance. She may carry within her the strain of their disagreements and conflicts.

If it is important for the man to know the girl’s parents, it is perhaps even more important for the girl to know his parents, particularly his mother. Generally he fits in better with her parents than she does with his.

EVELYN AND SYLVANUS DUVALL

SAVING YOUR MARRIAGE
, 1954

Founded in 1935, the Public Affairs Committee was a nonprofit organization that published pamphlets offering advice on social, family, and health problems, with titles ranging from “So You Think It’s Love!” to “Caring for Your Feet.” Having written frequently about marriage, Evelyn Duvall (see
Conflict
) teamed up with her husband, the Rev. Sylvanus Duvall (1900–1997), to survey more than five thousand spouses and report that three in four couples claimed they had trouble with in-laws. The Duvalls suggested diplomacy, respect, confrontation, love, and, if all that failed . . .

The pamphlet series was edited for many years by Maxwell Stewart, who also worked as an editor at
The Nation
and wrote some dozen economics books.

Some families have solved very difficult problems by helping “Mother” to find a job; a real job where she can feel wanted and worthy. A social agency may help in suggesting a useful program for the mother who has to give up her own home.

If you have done your best and still can not handle the problem, you may have to resort to more stringent measures. The simplest of these is escape. You move to another part of the town, or another city. If you cannot do this, you may have to face it where you are. Arguments with in-laws need not be fatal and may clear the air. The important thing is to make your own position clear. In any case, you may need assistance. Marriage counselors may help you to see your problems more clearly, and guide you in your actions.

In the last analysis, in-laws are people. Adjustments with them are basically the same as in any interpersonal relationships.

DANNY ARNOLD

“MOTHER, MEET WHAT’S HIS NAME,”
BEWITCHED
, 1964

Partly inspired by the play
Bell, Book and Candle
, about a man who falls in love with a witch, the television series
Bewitched
ran for eight seasons. With an ever-flustered mortal husband (Darrin Stephens) and his loving witch wife (Samantha) determined to live a normal life, the series also featured a supernaturally intrusive mother-in-law. As played to campy perfection by the classical actress Agnes Moorehead, Endora never got over her initial conviction that her daughter had made a terrible mistake.

Producer/director/comedian Danny Arnold (1925–1995) wrote the season-one episode in which mother-in-law and son-in-law meet for the first time.

J

JEALOUSY

EURIPIDES

MEDEA
, 431 BC

In Greek myth, Medea was the wife of Jason and his divine assistant in taking the golden fleece—and with it, the power of rule—from her father. In the play by Euripides (circa 484–406 BC), however, “Medea” became
jealousy
personified. Having discovered Jason’s infidelity with the daughter of Corinth’s king, Medea exacts her revenge by murdering the king and his daughter, as well as both the sons she’s had with Jason.

FRANCIS BACON

“OF MARRIAGE AND SINGLE LIFE,” 1612

Famous and influential as a statesman, author, scientist, and philosopher, Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) left no shortage of pronouncements on subjects ranging from the universal to the specific.

Bacon wrote this essay on marriage a decade before his own.

It is one of the best Bonds, both of Chastity and Obedience, in the Wife, if She think her Husband Wise; which She will never doe, if She finde him Jealous.

ALEXANDER BROME

“TO A JEALOUS HUSBAND,” 1664

A British attorney and popular satirical poet, Alexander Brome (1620–1666) seemed in this ditty to be making a simple argument: If she’s going to cheat, she’s going to cheat.

In vain thou shutt’st thy doors by day, in vain,

Windows by night, thy wife’s lust to restrain;

For if a woman only chaste will be

In watch and ward, she has no chastity.

ELIZA HAYWOOD

THE FEMALE SPECTATOR
, 1745

It was known as “amatory fiction” in the days when Eliza Haywood (circa 1693–1756) pioneered what we now call the romance novel, and she wrote a lot of it. Though details of her personal life are few and contradictory, it is known that Haywood was an actress in Ireland and England before she began writing. Throughout the early eighteenth century, she supported herself—and, apparently, her two children—by writing novels and plays, in many of which she thinly veiled society’s scandals. In 1728, Alexander Pope (see
Grievances
) brutally mocked her in his epic
The Dunciad
, but she reemerged in 1744 with
The Female Spectator
, the first periodical written for women by a woman.

To be jealous without a Cause, is such an Injury to the suspected Person as requires the utmost Affection and Good-Nature to forgive; because it wounds them in the two most tender Parts, their Reputation and Peace of Mind; lays them under Restraints the most irksome to Human Nature, or in a manner obliges them to Measures which are the Destruction of all Harmony.

Those few therefore who truly love, are in Possession of the Object of their Wishes, and yet suffer this poisonous Passion to disturb the Tranquility of their Lives, may be compar’d to Misers that pine amidst their Stores, and are incapable of enjoying a present Plenty through the Fears of future Want.

That Desire of prying into every thing a Husband does, and even into his very Thoughts, appears to me rather a childish Fondness than a noble generous Passion; and tho’ it may be pleasing enough to a Man in the first Months of his Marriage, will afterwards grow tiresome and insipid to him, as well as render both of them ridiculous to others.

We may depend on this, that the most innocent persons in the world, in some humours, or unguarded moments, may happen to say or do something which might not be altogether pleasing to us to be informed of—how mad a thing then is it to seek our occasions of disquiet! Yet this too many women are ingenious in doing, and afterwards no less industrious in throwing fresh matter on the mole-hill they haved discovered, till they raise it to a mountain—trifles perhaps too light to retain any place in the husband’s memory, and no sooner over than forgotten, or if of consequence enough to be remembered by him, are thought on with remorse, are revived by reproaches, and made to seem less faulty than they are, by the wife’s attempting to represent them as more so.