Cassell’s Family Paper on compatibility (1863-4).
"Young people themselves should focus less of their expectation on marriage as romance. It never was intended to be only the means by which two people, lost in each other, should find happiness. They should never have been encouraged, or allowed, to think it was this. Marriage may prove a gateway to heaven, or it may not. Certainly it will not be all heaven. Bringing children into the world and rearing them properly is an arduous undertaking, and a heavy responsibility. It calls for intelligence, knowledge, training, and many of the virtues: notably devotion, patience, capacity for faithful and hard labor through long years, and much self-forgetting. As such, people should approach it with consecration, like that of a knight, or one taking holy orders."
— William Gayley Simpson (via eugenicist)
(via seamofconsciousness)
Cranmer | Advertising Standards Authority persecutes His Grace:
Apparently there have been a number of complaints about one of the advertisements His Grace carried on behalf of the Coalition for Marriage. He has been sent all manner of official papers, formal documentation and threatening notices which demand answers to sundry questions by a certain deadline. He is instructed by the ‘Investigations Executive’ of this inquisition to keep all this confidential.
Since His Grace does not dwell in Iran, North Korea, Soviet Russia, Communist China or Nazi Germany, but occupies a place in the cyber-ether suspended somewhere between purgatory and paradise, he is minded to ignore that request. Who do these people think they are?
Notable in that this was written before WWII.
To be “reasonably comfortable and happy” is more than most people who have ever lived on the planet earth could ever lay claim to. We are indeed fortunate.
~ The Nervous Housewife, by Abraham Myerson, M.D., 1920
via internet archive
(click to enlarge)
~‘Are You Ready for Marriage?’, 1950
via How to be a Retronaut
click to enlarge and answer insightful questions like this one:
Your husband complains about the money you are spending, so…
A. You start to cry and call him an old skinflint!
B. You say,”Dear, why don’t we start a budget so we can see where our money goes?”
C. You tell him you’ll see what you can do - and then go to your father secretly for extra spending money!it would seem i am not ready for marriage
(via chanterbury)
What passion!
(“ere” = “before”, if you didn’t know)
learn about the agony column
Victorians weren’t all stiff upper lip all the time.
