'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' by Irvin S. Cobb and Mary Roberts Rinehart (e book reader pc .TXT) 📗

and work at their maximum as a sex. Men, being always boys, work under their maximum. (Loud screams here. But think it over! How about shaking dice at the club after lunch, and wandering back to the office at three P.M. to sign the mail? How about golf? I’ll wager I work more hours a day than you, Irvin!)

The plain truth is that if more men put their whole hearts into business during business hours, there would be no question of competition. As I have said, they think straighter than women, although more slowly. They have more physical strength. They don’t have sick headaches—unless they deserve them. But they are vaguely resentful when some little woman, who has washed the children and sent them off to school and straightened her house and set out a cold lunch, comes into the office at nine o’clock and works in circles all around them.

But there is another angle to this “woman in the business world” idea that puzzles women. Not long ago a clever woman whose husband does not resent her working, since his home and children are well looked after, said to me:

[p21]
“I’ve always been interested in what he had to say of his day at the office, but he doesn’t seem to care at all about my day. He seems so awfully self-engrossed.”

The truth probably is that they are both self-engrossed, but women can dissemble and men cannot. It is another proof of their invincible boyishness, this total inability to pretend interest. Even the averagest man is no hypocrite. He tries it sometimes, and fails pitifully. The successful male dissembler is generally a crook. But the most honest woman in the world is often driven to pretense, although she may call it savoir faire. She pretends, because pretense is the oil that lubricates society. Have you ever seen a man when some neighbors who are unpopular drop in for an evening call? After they are gone, his wife says:

“I do wish you wouldn’t bite the Andersons when they come in, Joe!”

“Bite them! I was civil, wasn’t I?”

“Well, you can call it that.”

He is ready to examine the window locks, but he turns and surveys her, and he is honestly puzzled.

“What I can’t make out,” he says, “is how you can fall all over yourself to those people, when you know you detest them. Thank heavens, I’m no hypocrite.”

Then he locks the windows and stalks up-stairs, [p22] and the hypocrite of the family smiles a little to herself. Because she knows that without her there would be no society and no neighborhood calls, and that honesty can be a vice, and hypocrisy a virtue.

I know a vestryman of a church who sometimes plays bridge on Saturday nights for money. What he loses doesn’t matter, but what he wins his wife is supposed to put on the plate the next morning. One Saturday night he gave her a large bill, and the next morning she placed a neatly folded green-back on the collection plate as he held it out to her. He stood in the aisle and eyed the bill with suspicion. Then he deliberately unfolded it, and held out the plate to her again.

“Come over, Mazie,” he said.

And Mazie came over with the balance.

You know what a woman would have done. She would have marked the bill with her eye, and later on while waiting at the rear for the chair offertory to end, she would have investigated. Then on the way home she would have said:

“I had a good notion to stand right there, Charlie Smith, and show you up. I wish I had.” But the point is that she wouldn’t have.

There is no moral whatever to this brief tale.

But perhaps it is in love that men and women differ most vitally. Now Nature, being extremely wise, gives the man in love the wisdom of the serpent [p23] and the wile of the dove (which is a most alluring bird in its love-making). A man in love brings to it all his intelligence. And men like being in love.

Being in love is not so happy for a woman. She becomes emotional and difficult, is either on the heights or in the depths. And the reason for this is simple; love is a complex to a woman. She has to contend with natural and acquired inhibitions. She both desires love and fears it.

The primitive woman ran away from her lover, but like Lot’s wife, she looked back. I am inclined to think, however, that primitive woman looked back rather harder than she ran. Be that as it may, women to-day both desire love and fear it.

If men fear it, they successfully hide their cowardice.

It is in their methods of making love that men cease to be alike. Up to that point they are very similar; they all think that, having purchased an automobile, they must vindicate their judgment by insisting upon its virtues, and a great many of them will spend as much money fixing over last year’s car as would almost buy a new one; they always think they drive carefully, but that the fellow in the other car is either a road hog or a lunatic who shouldn’t have a license; they are mostly rather moody before breakfast, although there is an obnoxious type that sings in the cold [p24] shower; they are all rather given to the practice of bringing gifts to their wives when they have done something they shouldn’t; and they all have a tendency to excuse their occasional delinquencies by the argument that they never made anybody unhappy, and their weaknesses by the fact that God made them men.

But it is in love that they are at their best, from the point of view of the one woman most interested. And it is in their love methods that they show the greatest variations from type. Certain things of course they all do, buy new neckties, write letters which they read years later with amazement and consternation; keep a photograph in a drawer of the desk at the office, where the stenographer finds it and says to the office boy: “Can you beat that? And not even pretty!” carry boxes of candy around, hoping they look like cigars; and lie awake nights wondering what she can see in him, and wondering if she is awake too.

They are very dear and very humble and sheepish and self-conscious when they are in love, curious mixtures of determination and vacillation; about eighty per cent, however, being determination. But they lose for once their sex solidarity, and play the game every man for himself. Roughly speaking (although who can speak roughly of them then? Or at any time?) they divide into three types of lovers. There are men who are all three, at different times of course. But these [p25] three classes of lovers have one thing in common. They want to do their own hunting. It gives them a sense of power to think they have won out by sheer strength and will.

The truth about this is that no man ever won a woman who was actually difficult to get, and found it worth the effort afterwards. What real man ever liked kissing a girl who didn’t want to be kissed? Love has got to be mutual. Your lover is frequently more interested in being loved than in loving. And the trump cards are always the woman’s. These grown-up boys of ours are shy and self-depreciatory in love, and they run like deer when they think they are not wanted. So the woman has to play a double game, and gets blamed for guile when it is only wisdom. Her instinct is to run, partly because she is afraid of love and partly because she has to appear to be pursued. But she has to limp a bit, and sit down and look back rather wistfully, and in the end of course she goes lame entirely and is overtaken.

This is the same instinct which makes the pheasant hen feign a broken wing.

There is a wonderful type of woman, however, who goes as straight to the man she loves as a homing pigeon to its loft.

Taking, then, the three classes of men in the throes of the disease of love, we have the following symptoms, diagnosis and prognosis.

First. The average lover. Temperature [p26] remains normal, with slight rise in the evenings. Continues to attend to business. Feeling of uneasiness if called by endearing names over office ’phone. Regular diet, but smokes rather too much. Anxiety strongly marked as to how his income will cover a house and garage in the country, adding the cost of his commutation ticket, and shows tendency to look rather wistfully into toy shop-windows before Christmas.

Diagnosis: Normal love.

Prognosis: Probably permanent condition.1

Second. The fearful lover. Temperature inclined to be sub-normal at times. Physical type, a hulking brute of a man, liking small women, only he feels coarse and rather gross when with them. He is the physical type generally attributed to the cave man, but this is an error. (See cave man, later.) His timidity is not physical but mental, and is referable by the Freud theory to his early youth, when he was taught that big, overgrown boys did not tease kittens, but put them in their pockets and carried them home. Has the kitten obsession still. Is six months getting up enough courage to squeeze a five-and-a-half hand, and then crushes it to death. Reads poetry, and is very early for all appointments. Appetite small. Does not sleep. In small communities [p27] shows occasional semi-paralysis on the curb after Sunday evening service, and lets a fellow half his size see her home. (See cave man, later.) Is always in love, but not with the same woman. Is easily hurt, and walks it off on Sunday afternoons. Telephones with gentle persistence, and prefers the movies to the theater because they are dark. This type sometimes loses its gentleness after marriage, and always has an ideal woman in mind. Some one who walks like Pauline Frederick and smiles like Mary Pickford.2

Diagnosis: Normal love, with idealistic complications.

Prognosis: Condition less permanent than in case A, as less essentially monogamous. Should be careful not to carry the search for the ideal to excess.

Third. The cave man. Temperature normally high, with dangerous rises. Physique rather under-sized, with prominent Adam’s apple. Is attracted by large women, whom he dominates. Is assured, violent and jealous. Appetite fastidious. Takes sleeping powders during course of disease and uses telephone frequently to find out if the object of his affections is lunching with another man. Is extremely possessive as to women, and has had in early years a strong desire to take [p28] the other fellow’s girl away from him. Is pugnacious and intelligent, but has moments of great tenderness and charm. Shows his worst side to the neighbors and breathes freely after nine o’clock P.M., when no one has come to call.3

Diagnosis: Normal love, with jealousy.

Prognosis: A large family of daughters.

A great many women believe that they can change men by marrying them. This is a mistake. Women make it because they themselves are pliable, but the male is firmly fixed at the age of six years, and remains fundamentally the same thereafter. The only way to make a husband over according to one’s ideas then would be to adopt him at an early age, say four. But who really wants to change them? Where would be the interest in marriage? To tell the truth, we like their weaknesses. It gives women that entirely private conviction they have that John would make an utter mess of things if they were not around.

Men know better how to live than women. The average man gets more out of life than the average woman. He compounds his days, if he be a healthy, normal individual, of work and play, and his play generally takes the form of fresh air and exercise. He has, frequently, more real charity than his womankind, and by charity I [p29] mean an understanding of human weakness and a tolerance of frailty. He may dislike his neighbors heartily, and snub them in prosperity, but in trouble he is quick with practical assistance. And although often tactless, for tact and extreme honesty are incompatible, he is usually kind. There is often a selfish purpose behind his altruism, his broad charitable organizations. But to individual cases of distress he is generous, unselfish, and sacrificing.

In politics he is individually honest, as a rule, but collectively corrupt. And this strange and disheartening fact is due to lethargy. He is politically indolent, so he allows the few to rule, and this few is too frequently in political life for what it can get and not what it can give. Sins of omission may be grave sins.

Yet he is individually honest in politics, and in most things, and that, partly at least, is because, pretty much overlaid with worldliness, he has a deep religious conviction. But he has a terrible fear