...after thirty, both husband and wife know in their hearts that the game is up. Without a few cocktails social intercourse becomes a torment. It is no longer spontanenous; it is a convention by which they agree to shut their eyes to the fact that the other men and women they know are tired, dull and fat, and yet must be put up with as politely as they themselves are put up with in their turn.
I have seen many happy young couples - but I have seldom seen a happy home after husband and wife are thirty. Most homes can be divided into four classes:
1st. Where the husband is a pretty conceited guy who thinks that a dinky insurance business is a lot harder than raising babies and that everybody ought to kow-tow to him at home. He is the kind whose sons usually get away from home as soon as they can walk.
2d. When the wife has got a sharp tongue and the martyr complex, and thinks she's the only woman in the world that ever had a child. This is probably the unhappiest home of all.
3d. Where the children are always being reminded how nice it was of the parents to bring them into the world, and how they ought to respect their parents for being born in 1870 instead of 1902.
4d. Where everything is for the children. Where the parents pay much more for the children's education than they afford, and spoil them unreasonably. This usually ends by the children being ashamed of the parents.
And yet I think that marriage is the most satisfatory institution we have. I'm simply stating my belief that when Life has used us for its purposes it takes away all our attractive qualities and gives us, instead, ponderous but shallow convictions of our own wisdom and "experience".