The Unquiet Bed, The Inviolable Retreat: Navigating Harmony and Strife in Marriage

“ But shall we not promise each other that we will never part in anger, even when the separation may not be for an hour? or ever lie down to sleep at night unreconciled, if there has been the slightest misunderstanding or coldness between us? ”

“ A difference with your husband ought to be considered as the greatest calamity—as one that is to be most studiously guarded against; it is a demon which must never be permitted to enter a habitation where all should be peace, unimpaired confidence, and heartfelt affection. Besides, what can a woman gain by her opposition or her differences? Nothing. But she loses every thing; she loses her husband's respect for her virtues, she loses his love, and with that, all prospect of future happiness. She creates her own misery, and then utters idle and silly complaints, but utters them in vain. ”

“ No effort must be spared by either husband or wife to contribute to the other's happiness and comfort. It does not require a long time, especially when living together, for one to see what will please another. This desire to please, strengthening with the days and years, revealing itself in a thousand kindly ways, will do more than any thing else to make the home a paradise on earth. ”

“ What a blessed thing it is for a man to love his wife and be satisfied with her, and to think her the fairest being in all the world; and how thrice happy is he who can stretch out the sweetest season of his existence, the days of triumphant courtship, through the flying years of all his life, and then lie down to die in the quieted ecstasy of a first love. ”

“ The quarrel was forgotten; husband and wife eagerly inquired where the fire was burning. "In hell," was the unexpected reply, "and thither married people must go who persist in living in enmity, anger, and dissension." The lesson to be drawn from this is that married people should live together in love and harmony, not in strife and discord. They should seek to please one another, they should pray for one another, and bear with one another. And they should live in conjugal fidelity, that is, they should keep the solemn promises made to one another at the altar. ”

“ Some day, darling, we will protect others. There is lots of work to do in our Master’s vineyard. We will love to work together; all angels do. In Heaven and all other stars where true soul-mates are united in holy marriage, they are called angels. In Mars we almost always see the two together. Sweetheart, our souls were living and shining in space together for centuries. All others are the same. God loves us more than we love Him. Our souls are very dear and can never, never be lost—that is an impossibility. ”

“ Let them understand that physical union should be the expression of a spiritual union. Let them learn that love, though it includes passion, is more than passion, and must transcend and outlive passion. And let us insist that all should learn the truth about themselves—about their own bodies and about their own natures—so that they may understand what they do, and may have all the help that knowledge can give in doing it. I hold that on such knowledge and such understanding the community should insist, if it is to uphold the high and difficult standard of indissoluble monogamous marriage. ”

“ If man or woman could only wait in seasons of anger, all would blow over and harmony return like spring flowers, that are not always in blossom.
Don’t both speak at once, nor both get angry at once, nor both be too determined at once. No one is ever convinced by angry tones. ”

“ But think of the first years of married life with one you love: what happiness, what happiness there sometimes is in it! And indeed it's the ordinary thing. In those early days even quarrels with one's husband end happily. Some women get up quarrels with their husbands just because they love them. ”

“ There are periods in a married couple's life when further living together seems unthinkable; and still a month or two or a year passes and the husband and wife live happily together and cannot believe that there was ever any friction between them. The couples are very few, indeed, who never went through any squalls or storms, whose lives were not darkened by disagreements, quarrels and apparently irreconcilable antagonisms. But after the storm the sun shone brightly again, and the quarrels were followed by harmony and peace. After that love was intensified. ”

“ A MAN'S sweethearts are like his cigars; he has many of each of them, loves each one as tenderly as the preceding, and appreciates each according to its expensiveness.
A HUSBAND can always find fault with his wife, but, then, even archangels could pick flaws in one another if they had to drink coffee at the same table every morning.
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MATRIMONY is, like the weather, mighty uncertain, and the happiest people are those who are neither looking for storms nor banking on sunshine, but are just willing to go along sensibly and take what comes. ”

“ The bed in which a wife lies is the constant scene of quarrels and mutual recriminations. There is little chance of sleep there. Then is she indeed bitter toward her husband, fiercer than tigress robbed of her whelps; when, conscious of her secret guilt, she counterfeits groans, or hates the servants, or upbraids you with some rival of her own creation, with tears ever fruitful, ever ready at their post, and only waiting her command in what way to flow. You believe it genuine love. ”

“ Marriage is funny. It's a thing men can't bear unless it's gilded. And they vent their intolerance. Do you know that before you went away—for four years—I scarcely ever expected you to say loving or civil things. Before you went out in the mornings you shouted for the breakfast, and I was hurrying all I could; and you grumbled if the children made a noise. And when you came in, if dinner wasn't ready or right, you grumbled at that again. And in the week-ends the kids dared hardly play, and I was buffer all the time between you and them. It's just what happens in thousands of homes, of course. ”

“ If they are to be happy together, they must both give and take. I know a married couple who are now the happiest, prosiest, most attached old pair in the world, who went through no end of storms during their first eventful year. ”

“ Joy and Pleasure.
A married life is not one of unalloyed bliss. We ought not to expect this. It has its pains as well as its pleasures. As Margaret Fuller says: “Deceive not thyself by over-expecting happiness in the marriage state; look not therein for contentment greater than God will give, or a creature in this world can receive, namely, to be free from all inconveniences. Marriage is not, like the hill of Olympus, wholly clear without clouds.” ”

“ Too many couples exploit the sense of let-down that marriage brings with it. After so long a time, husband and wife cease to feel that they must exert themselves for each other in little matters. Knowing themselves accepted, they lounge—mentally, mannerly, and physically—when at home or elsewhere alone together. Some of this relaxation is a good thing, but it is a mistake to let home and spouse degenerate into nothing more than an invitation to be lazy.
Using the mate for relief, as in nagging, whining, crying, or grumbling, is taboo. ”

“ Where love is only a dream, the marriage is an alarm clock.
If you cannot endure your mother-in-law, you can begin your plans at once to live alone, when your children are married.
A quarrel between two people to settle things, is a good deal like a dog fight in a flower bed, the only things that get settled are the flowers. ”

“ I have lived in what to all the world seemed a happy union. I have endured the terrible anguish of a violent rupture of firmly-knit bonds of attachment and affection - but how insignificant is all this, how sorry this apparent happiness, how slight the anguish compared to the mighty and transcendent things that were gained - the perfect tenderness, the real intimacy of true conjugal love, the complete melting into one of two cells in the great body of humanity.
I have good reason to believe that most marriages - oh! by far the most - are of inferior quality and falser than my own false union. ”

“ IN marriage, the love-light so often goes out as soon as the gas bills begin to come in.
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THE only way to be happy with a husband is to learn to be happy without him most of the time.
LOVE is just the shine on the jewel of matrimony; but, after all, the shine on a jewel is the whole thing.
A MAN firmly believes that, if he can only keep his wife in the straight and narrow path, he can go out and zig-zag all over the downward one without falling from grace.
A GIRL is never so surprised when a man proposes to her as he is. ”

“ Name me rather all barbaric times and nations, in which—for both indeed only reckon the man, never the wife—a happy marriage means nothing more than a happy husband. No one stands by near enough to hear and to count a woman's sighs; the unheard pang becomes at last speechless; new wounds weaken the bleeding of the oldest. ”

“ A loveless marriage—a lonely passage through life—and God only knew what secret trials—what withering of the heart—what solitude of the soul—what measure of that hope deferred, which makes the heart sick—of that craving void which nothing fills, were to be hers, who had grown up and blossomed like the rose in the wilderness, and who had been, like her own poor flower, too rudely transplanted, doomed perhaps like it, to wither and to die. ”

“ After just escaping marriage with a rich old man who educated her, she married a wealthy and most exemplary husband whom she divorced, after having lived tranquilly with him for a score of years, with no cause on either side but because she felt a growing passion for solitude. ”

“ The exterior decorum and attention on the part of an altered husband, which betrays to the world no dereliction of morals but what its easy code passes over as a right, is no substitute for love. Not unfrequently there is something almost appalling in the sense of solitude, which on occasions of sickness or retirement oppresses a young woman, who to all appearance is overwhelmed with attendance. The hand is not there that would render every other superfluous. A voice is wanting, whose absence leaves the silence and horror of death. ”

“ No soul can grow to its full stature without spells of solitude. A married woman's body and soul should be essentially her own, and that can only be so if she has an inviolable retreat. But at the same time the custom of having separate rooms should not mean, as it often does, that the husband only comes to his wife's room when he has some demand to make upon her. Nothing is more calculated to inhibit all desire for union in a sensitive wife than the knowledge of what her husband wants when he comes, however lovingly, to her side. ”

“ Unselfish ambition, nobler life-motives, increased happiness and usefulness, — these different elements of the human mind, meeting and mingling, constitute the true marriage. In such union there is strength.
Let there be moral freedom in wedlock. Never contract the horizon of a worthy outlook, by the selfish exaction of all another's time and thoughts. With additional joys, benevolence should grow more diffusive. The narrowness and jealousy that would confine a wife or husband forever within four walls will not promote the sweet interchange of confidence that comes of love ”

“ We have a superabundance of one quality of life in our home, and a change is absolutely requisite for our mental as well as for our physical well-being. Absence from it, separation between us, a going out into new atmospheres, a social mingling with persons we do not daily come in contact with, will produce the most beneficial results. This is what every family at times needs. One great objection I have to our marriage system is, that as society is now constittuted, it allows no freedom to the individual. ”

“ There is no return in kind; no change given for the golden coin of life recklessly thrown on the counters of lust!
LV. The bitterest matrimonial discontents arise from the half-unconscious misconception that happiness, not growth, is the end of marriage, and the forgetfulness that human nature is universal. It is impossible for two people thoroughly to know each other until they have been tested by the exigencies of a united life. If then a radical antagonism of temperament is developed, which makes the union oppressive, why should the discordant souls be kept together? ”

“ We are thus confronted by still another phase of the emancipation movement—the divorce problem. In this problem woman has a peculiar interest. The wife more frequently than the husband is seeking in divorce a release from marital ills; for in her case it often involves an escape from sexual slavery. The divorce movement, therefore, is in part an expression of woman's growing independence. ”

“ For the disorder which leads to this confusion of the sex-relation, the first remedy is to establish the independence of the woman.
The problem of marriage will remain acute—and, indeed, ultimately insoluble—until the contracting parties enter it upon the basis of an equal partnership. The conception of marriage as a “career” for women has done much to destroy the only conditions under which marriage can ever be successful. ”

“ The moment a woman marries she is more or less the subject of every existing authority. Conventional society dictates to her how, where, and in what manner it is proper for her to live. In the eyes of the law her personal liberty and her status are nil, her husband may lock her up and refuse her friends access to her, the guardianship of her children is not hers; again, marriage involves her in personal discomfort, suffering, and danger to life. ”

“ What good are we to expect from the changes proposed in our customs and institutions? Would mankind be at all better off if women were free? If not, why disturb their minds, and attempt to make a social revolution in the name of an abstract right?
It is hardly to be expected that this question will be asked in respect to the change proposed in the condition of women in marriage. The sufferings, immoralities, evils of all sorts, produced in innumerable cases by the subjection of individual women to individual men, are far too terrible to be overlooked. ”