"A Guide to Men" by Helen Rowland - 12 - Finale

FINALE ALL the love routes lead to a kiss-but some men make love with the directness of an express train, some as haltingly as a local and some with the charm, smoothness and variation of a "special." When a man complains of the girls who "pursue" him, don't forget that the mark of a real "girl-charmer" is his dead silence concerning all women except the one to whom he happens to be talking. A man's idea of displaying "resolution" appears to be first to find out what a woman wants him to do, and then to proceed "resolutely" not to do it. Presence of mind in love making is a sure sign of absence of heart; no man begins to be serious until he begins to be foolish. The girl a man marries is never the one he ought to marry or intended to marry, but just some "innocent bystander" who happened to be in the way at the psychological moment.[119] A woman's heart is like a frame, which holds only one picture at a time; a man's is more like a cinemetograph. A man's love is not actually dead until he begins subconsciously to think of his wife as the person who makes him wear his rubbers, mow the lawn, put up the fly-screens, and explain where he has been all Saturday afternoon. The average man is so busy backing away from the girls he ought to marry that he usually backs right into the arms of the one woman under Heaven that he ought not to marry. A man is like a motor-car which always balks on the trolley-tracks and runs at top speed down hill; a wife is the human brake that prevents him from going to destruction. When a girl refuses a man his greatest emotion is not disappointment, but astonishment that she should be so blind to her own luck.[120] Nothing bores a man so much as for a woman to give him all her love-when he wanted only a little of it. Solomon was the only man who ever had six hundred and ninety-nine alibis when one of his wives detected the fragrance of another woman's sachet on his coat lapel. Every man "rocks the boat" of happiness at least once during a love affair-usually by trying to leap out of it before it lands in the port of Matrimony. All a man needs in order to win any woman is a little audacity, a little mendacity and plenty of pertinacity. The only chain that can bind love is an endless chain of compliments. When a woman doesn't marry it is usually because she has never met the man with whom she could be perfectly happy; but when a man remains single it is usually because he has never met the woman without whom he could not be perfectly happy.[121] Most men expect to "reform" between the last dose of medicine and the last breath. Speaking of the modern advance in the "arts and crafts" it requires more art to get a husband and more craft to keep one nowadays, than it ever did. A frank man may be the noblest work of God, but he is as much of a nuisance in feminine society as a woman on a fishing trip. There is always a chance that a man may escape from the bonds of matrimony; but an old bachelor is wedded by all the bonds of nature to a collection of habits from which nothing but death can divorce him. By the time he marries, a bachelor's heart has been pressed, cleaned and mended so often that it will barely hold together through the honeymoon.[122] It seems so unreasonable of man to expect a woman to think straight, walk straight, or talk straight, considering that she was made from his rib-the crookedest bone in his body. Motto for a married man's den: "Others love your wife, why not you?" A man's idea of being perfectly loyal to a woman is to "think of her always"-even when he is kissing another woman. Love is just a glittering illusion with which we gild the hard, cold facts of life-until all the world seems bright and shining! Most men are so busy dodging one love affair that they step right back under the wheels of another, and are fatally mangled. A brave man is always ready to "face the music"-provided it isn't that old tune from Lohengrin.[123] If married couples would show as much respect for one another's personal liberty, habits and preferences as they do for one another's toothbrushes, love's young dream would not so often turn into a nightmare. It is the Siamese twin existence they impose on themselves that drives them to distraction or destruction. A man kills time with a golf stick; a woman with a lip-stick. It is foolish to fancy that a man is thinking of proposing to you; a man never proposes to any woman, until he has gotten past "thinking." If a man would employ a little more commonsense before marriage and a little more incense afterwards, matrimony would be more of an inspiration and less of a visitation. Never trust a husband too far, nor a bachelor too near.[124] The man who takes a kiss "for granted" doesn't stand a chance beside the man who takes it before it is granted. Husband: A miniature volcano, constantly smoking, usually grumbling, and always liable to violent and unexpected eruptions. On the journey of matrimony, there are no garages where punctured illusions can be patched up, shattered ideals mended, and empty hearts refilled. Of course a man is not as jealous as a woman-because it's so hard for him to believe that a girl on whom he bestows himself could possibly wish for anything better. The making of a husband out of a mere man is not a sinecure; it's one of the highest plastic arts known to civilization. Before marriage a woman says sweetly, "I understand you!" After marriage she says coldly, "I see through you!"[125] Oh, what is so stupid as last year's song, So foolish as last year's fashion, So completely forgotten as last year's girl, And so dead as a last year's passion?