WO'C Helps With The Bush Marriage Plan
The Bush administration wants you to get married and stay married. According to the New York Times, White House officials are planning to unveil a 1.5 billion dollar initiative to promote marriage. The money would go to provide training for couples to develop interpersonal skills that sustain "healthy marriages."
And World O'Crap, always eager to support the Bush administration, is here to help in this endeavor.
So, first we will further the President's plan to "Help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain 'healthy marriages'" by presenting you with this quiz:
Are You a Good Wife?
1. Does he think you are affectionate and loving?
2. Does he like the meals you serve him?
3. Can you cheer him up when he is depressed?
4. Do you manage to stay within your budget?
5. Can you accept his viewpoint when you two disagree?
6. Does he like the social life you provide?
7. When he is tired, do you see that he rests?
8. Does he take a real interest in the home?
9. Are you responsive to his gestures of affection?
10. Do you welcome your husband's friends?
11. Have you any habits that greatly annoy him?
12. Does your temper often get the better of you?
13. Is there friction between you and his relatives?
14. Do you often "check up" on him and his actions?
15. Are you frequently tired and irritable?
Credit 1 point for each Yes to the first 10 questions and each No to the last 5. You should be proud of a score of 13 or more, since 10 is about average. Something is wrong if you score 8 or less. You may still be a home wife but you need to analyze your incorrect answers to find how you can make improvements.
So, ladies, how do you measure up? Are you providing a pleasant social life for your husband? Cooking food he likes? Cheering him up when he's depressed? Making him rest when he's tired? Accepting his opinion when you argue (hey, he IS the "head" of the household)? Ensuring that he's really interested in your home? Always receptive to his "affection"? And never, ever tired and irritable? If not, shape up! President Bush is counting on you!
Anyway, this quiz comes from the September 1949 Ladies' Home Journal. The Journal offered a monthly feature called "Making Marriage Work," by Clifford R. Adams of the Penn State College psychology department. I think he charged substantially less than 1.5 billion to provide this training, so if he's still alive, the White House should give him a call.
Of course, it takes two to make a marriage work. While Ladies Home Journal offered no comparable quiz for husbands, I did find some advice for you married men which I will present in our next Healthy Marriage Seminar. It comes from an unlikely source. . .
But for now, I want to address you single people: why the hell aren't you married?!
Read the following story, and learn from it the heartache of being 30 . . .and alone!
"I am one of those women who, as the saying is 'missed the boat' . . . women who dream of a husband, a home, and children -- and never get them.
There is never a morning as I start out for work but that I wish I could remain at home to look after a family. There is never a twilight but that my loneliness comes out of the dusk to sadden me as I open the door to my empty flat.
It wasn't always like this. Men used to find me attractive. Two wanted to marry me. Then some unexplainable change took place in me. I met new men, of course, but somehow their interest was only momentary. I could not fathom the reason for their indifference then, nor can I now. To this day I do not know what is wrong with me. I wish to heaven I did. It's no fun being thirty--and alone."
Sad, isn't it? Poor old maid -- instead of being surrounded by wailing children needing diaper changes, and a brutish husband demanding food, sex, and a better social life, she's doomed to sit alone in her cheerless flat and read the "Left Behind" series. And she has to do it in the dark, because when you're single, you're poor, and can't afford lightbulbs. That's why President Bush wants her to get married: so her husband can support her, instead of her making the goverment do it. She's letting the whole country down by repelling men this way!
So, just what does she do to turn men away? Is there no hope for her, and others like her? To find out, we'll consult the drawing of the head of a kindly, old family physician:
An unusual case you say? Nothing of the sort [you moron]. Countless women and men are probably in exactly the same situation right now -- and ignorant of the reason for it.
After all, nothing repels others and kills romance so quickly as halitosis (bad breath).
And the rest is an ad for Listerine, which wishes to reminds you: "If you want people to like you, if you want to get along in business, use Listerine night and morning and between times when you want to be sure you're at your best."
True in 1939, and still true today. So, step #1 in the World O'Crap plan to get you married: use mouthwash.
Step 2: Don't Date Dictators!
In the same issue of True Story as the Listerine ad, there's a story called "I Married a Dictator" ("Cruelly hurt by love, she was bitter, reckless. Then she married this man who was destined to be...".) It's the story of a flighty, immature young woman who fell in love with a married man. His wife finds out about them, and our heroine is named as corespondent in her divorce suit. ("For the sake of the children, she had said, old enough now to notice their father's bad example. Stephen had never mentioned his children to me.")
And so everyone knows her shameful secret (although she insists to us that she never actually, you know, did it with him), and she is a pariah to decent society. Her aunt kicks her out of the house. She gets fired from her job. And then her lover dumps her and has his lawyer pay her to go away. ("I was stunned! Stephen to treat me like a woman of the streets, a potential blackmailer! How many other loose women, I wondered, had he got on pension?") So, with no job, no home (but a purse full of cash), she decides to move overseas, to make a new life for herself. She ends up in Germany . . . (to be continued tomorrow.)
But just from this first part, I hope you single women have learned a valuable lesson about breaking up other people's marriages: namely, that it's not nice! And that when you date married men, it makes President Bush cry.
Summary of Lesson One in the WO'C "Getting Married and Staying Married, to Please the President" training program:
A. If you're a wife, be a better one.
B. If you're single, think about how lonely you'll be if you're 30 and don't have a husband. Then use mouthwash.
C. Don't be a home wrecker.
D. Tune in tomorrow, for more lessons.
4:06:43 AM 
|
