| <Saturday Review, 12 June 1869, 770-1>
| <Eliza Lynn Linton>
| <BORED HUSBANDS.>
| <etext downloaded from Project Gutenberg with thanks>
| The curtain falls on joined hands when it does not descend on a
| tragedy; and novels for the most part end with a wreath of
| orange-blossoms and a pair of high-stepping greys, as the last act
| that claims to be recorded. For both novelists and playwrights assume
| that with marriage all the great events of life have ceased, and that,
| once wedded to the beloved object, there is sure to be smooth sailing
| and halcyon seas to the end of time. It sounds very cynical and
| shocking to question this pretty belief; but unfortunately for us who
| live in the world as it is and not as it is supposed to be, we find
| that even a union with the beloved object does not always ensure
| perfect contentment in the home, and that bored husbands are by no
| means rare.
| The ideal honeymoon is of course an Elysian time, during which nothing
| works rusty nor gets out of joint; and the ideal marriage is only a
| life-long honeymoon, where the happiness is more secure and the love
| deeper, if more sober; but the prose reality of one and the other has
| often a terrible dash of weariness in it, even under the most
| favourable conditions. Boredom begins in the very honeymoon
| itself. At first starting in married life there are many dangers to be
| encountered, not a shadow of which was seen in the wooing. There are
| odd freaks of temper turning up quite unexpectedly; there is the
| sense, so painful to some men, of being tied for life, of never being
| able to be alone again, never free and without responsibilities; there
| are misunderstandings to-day and the struggle for mastery
| to-morrow ~~ the cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, which may prove to
| be the tempest that will destroy all; there is the unrest of
| travelling, and the awkwardness of unusual association, to help in the
| general discomfort; or, if the happy pair have settled down in a vale
| and a cottage for their month, there is the <p> 'sad satiety' </p> 
| which all
| men feel after a time when they have had one companion only, with no
| outside diversion to cause a break. But the honeymoon at last draws to
| a close, and the relieved bridegroom gets back to his old haunts, to
| his work, his friends, and his club; and though he takes to all these
| things again with a difference, still they are helps and additions.
| This is the time of trial to a woman. If she gets over this pinch, and
| is sensible enough to understand that human nature cannot be kept up
| at high pressure, even in love, and that a man must sooner or later
| come down from romance to work-a-day prose, from the passionate lover
| to the cool and sober husband ~~ if she can understand this, and settle
| into his pace, without fretting on the one hand or casting about
| for unhealthy distractions on the other ~~ she will do well, and will
| probably make a pleasant home, and thereby diminish the boredom of
| life. But unfortunately, not every woman can do this; and it is just
| during this time of the man's transition from the lover to the friend
| that so many women begin to make shipwreck of their own happiness and
| his. They think to keep him a romantic wooer still, by their tears at
| his prosaic indifference to the little sentimentalities once so
| eagerly accepted and offered; they try to hold him close by their
| flattering but somewhat tiresome exactions; their jealousies ~~ very
| pretty perhaps, and quite as flattering ~~ 
| are infinite, and as baseless
| as they are infinite; all of which is very nice up to a certain point
| and in the beginning of things, but all of which gets wearisome as
| time goes on, and a man wants both a little change and a little rest.
| But women do not see this; or seeing it, they cannot accept it as a
| necessary condition of things; wherefore they go on in their fatal
| way, and by the very unwisdom of their own love bore their husband out
| of his. Or they grow substantially cold because he is superficially
| cooler, and think themselves justified in ceasing to love him
| altogether because he takes their love for granted, and so has ceased
| to woo it.
| If they are jealous, or shy, or unsocial, as so many women are, they
| make life very heavy by their exclusiveness, and the monastic
| character they give the home. A man married to a woman of this
| kind is, in fact, a house prisoner, whose only free spaces lie beyond
| the four walls of home. His bachelor friends are shut out. They smoke;
| or entice him to drink more than his wife thinks is good for him; or
| they induce him to bet on the Derby; or to play for half-crowns at
| whist or billiards; or they lead him in some other way of offence
| abhorrent to women. So the bachelor friends are shouldered out; and
| when the husband wants to entertain them, he must invite them to his
| club ~~ if he has one ~~ and pay the penalty when he gets home. 
| In a few
| years' time his wife will be glad to encourage her sons' young friends
| to the house, for the sake of the daughters on hand; but husbands and
| sons are in a different category, and there are few fathers who do not
| learn, as time goes on, how much the mother will allow that the wife
| refused.
| If bachelor friends are shouldered out of the house, all female
| friends are forbidden anything like an intimate footing, save those
| few whom the wife thinks specially devoted to herself and of whom she
| is not jealous. And these are very few. There are perhaps no women in
| the world so exclusive in their dealings with their husbands as are
| Englishwomen. A husband is bound to one woman only, no doubt; but the
| average wife thinks him also bound to have no affection whatever
| outside her and perhaps her family. If he meets an intelligent woman,
| pleasant to talk to, of agreeable manners and ready wit, and if
| he talks to her in consequence with anything like persistency or
| interest, he offends against the unwritten law; and his wife, whose
| utmost power of conversation consists in putting in a yes or no with
| tolerable accuracy of aim, thinks herself slighted and ill-used. She
| may be young and pretty, and dearly loved for her own special
| qualities; and her husband may not have a thought towards his new
| friend, or any other woman, in the remotest degree trenching on his
| allegiance to her; but the fact that he finds pleasure, though only of
| an intellectual and æsthetic kind, in the society of any other woman,
| that he feels an interest in her life, chooses her for his friend, or
| finds community of pursuits or sympathy in ideas, makes his wife by
| just so much a victim and aggrieved.
| And yet what a miserably monotonous home is that to which she would
| confine him! He is at his office all day, badgered and worried with
| various business complications, and he comes home tired, perhaps
| cross ~~ even well-conducted husbands have that way sometimes. He finds
| his wife tired and cross too; so that they begin the evening together
| mutually at odds, she irritated by small cares and he disturbed by
| large anxieties. Or he finds her preoccupied and absorbed in her own
| pursuits, and quite disinclined to make any diversion for his sake. He
| asks her for some music; she used to be ready enough to sing and play
| to him in the old love-making days; but she refuses now. Either she
| has some needlework to do, which might have been done during the
| day when he was out, or baby is asleep in the nursery, and music in
| the drawing-room would disturb him ~~ at all events she cannot sing or
| play to-night; and even if she does ~~ he has heard all her pieces so
| often! If he is not a reading-man, those long, dull, silent evenings
| are very trying. She works, and drives him wild with the click of her
| needle; or she reads the last new novel, and he hates novels, and gets
| tired to death when she insists on telling him all about the story and
| the characters; or she chooses the evening for letter-writing, and if
| the noise of her pen scratching over the paper does not irritate him,
| perhaps it sends him to sleep, when at least he is not bored. But
| dull, objectless, and vacant as their evenings are, his wife would not
| hear of any help from without to give just that little fillip which
| would prevent boredom and not create ceremony. She would think her
| life had gone to pieces, and that only desolation was before her, if
| he hinted that his home was dull, and that though he loves her very
| dearly and wants no other wife but her, yet that her society
| only ~~ <hi> toujours perdrix </hi>, without change or addition ~~ 
| is a little stupid, however nice the partridge may be, 
| and that things would be
| bettered if Mrs. or Miss So-and-So came in sometimes, just to brighten
| up the hours. And if he were to make a practice of bringing home his
| men friends, she would probably let all parties concerned feel pretty
| distinctly that she considered the home her special sanctuary, and
| that guests whom she did not invite were intruders. She would
| perhaps go willingly enough to a ball or crowded 
| <hi> soirée </hi>, or she
| might like to give one; but that intimate form of society, which is a
| mere enlargement of the home life, she dreads as the supplementing of
| deficiencies, and thinks her married happiness safer in boredom than
| in any diversion from herself as the sole centre of her husband's
| pleasure.
| Home life stagnates in England; and in very few families is there any
| mean between dissipation and this stagnation. We can scarcely wonder
| that so many husbands think matrimony a mistake as we have it in our
| insular arrangements; that they look back regretfully to the time when
| they were unfettered and not bored; or that their free friends, who
| watch them as wild birds watch their caged companions, curiously and
| reflectively, share their opinion. Wife and home, after all, make up
| but part of a man's life; they are not his all, and do not satisfy the
| whole of his social instinct; nor is any one woman the concentration
| of all womanhood to a man, leaving nothing that is beautiful, nor in
| its own unconjugal way desirable, on the outside. Besides, when with
| his wife a man is often as much isolated as when alone, for any real
| companionship there is between them. Few women take a living interest
| in the lives of men, and fewer still understand them. They expect the
| husband to sympathize with them in the kitchen gossip and the nursery
| chatter, the neighbours' doings and all the small household politics;
| but they are utterly unable to comprehend his pleasures, his
| thoughts, his duties, the responsibilities of his profession, or the
| bearings of any public question in which he takes a part.
| Even if this were not so, and granting that they could enter fully
| into his life and sympathize with him as intelligent equals, not only
| as compassionate saints or loving children, there would still be the
| need of novelty, and still the certainty of boredom without it. For
| human life, like all other forms of life, must have a due proportion
| of fresh elements continually added to keep it sweet and growing, else
| it becomes stagnant and stunted. And daily intercourse undeniably
| exhausts the moral ground. After the close companionship of years no
| one can remain mentally fresh to the other, unless indeed one or both
| be of the rarest order of mind and of a practically inexhaustible
| power of acquiring knowledge. Save these exceptional instances, we
| must all of necessity get worn out by constant intercourse. We know
| every thought, every opinion, and almost every square inch of
| information possessed; we have heard the old stories again and again,
| and know exactly what will lead up to them, and at what point they
| will begin; we have measured the whole sweep of mind, and have probed
| its depths; and though we may love and value what we have learnt, yet
| we want something new ~~ fresh food for interest, 
| though not necessarily
| a new love for the displacement of the old. But this is what very few
| Englishwomen can understand or will allow. They hold so intensely
| by the doctrine of unity that they are even jealous of a man's
| pursuits, if they think these take up any place in his mind which
| might also be theirs. They must be good for every part of his life;
| and the poorest of them all must be his only source of interest,
| suffering no other woman to share his admiration nor obtain his
| friendship, though this would neither touch his love nor interfere
| with their rights. Friendship is a hard saying to them, and one they
| cannot receive. Wherefore they keep a tight grasp on the marital
| collar, and suffer no relief of monotony by judicious loosening, nor
| by generous faith in integral fidelity. The practical result of which
| is that most men are horribly bored at home, and that the mass of them
| really suffer from the domestic stagnation to which national customs
| and the exclusiveness of women doom them so soon as they become family
| men. It must however, in fairness be added, that in general they
| obtain some kind of compensation; and that very few walk meekly in
| their bonds without at times slipping them off, with or without the
| concurrence of their wives.