by Ursula Bloom
If your nerve fails you altogether, you will have to write it, but I never think that this is a wise proceeding. In my lifetime two men proposed to me by letter, and I am ashamed to say that I laughed very much indeed. It looks queer in writing. I was not attracted by either of them, which possibly explains my merriment, but you can never capture the mood in which a letter is written, and therefore you lose much which is essential to a proposal.
No, I’d try to say it if I were you.
What you will say to her, rests with you. I don’t think the words matter very much when the meaning is so sweet.
You discuss money matters with her, and, if she is very young, with her people. I would have a marriage settlement, because this protects you as well as her, and is a certainty for the children. Be guided over the running of the financial side, by men who are older than yourself; it may seem silly, and they may seem unromantic, but they have been through the mill themselves, so they are, or ought to be, ready to advise you. Also on financial matters you don’t want romance, and while you are so desperately in love, it is foolish to try to tackle these questions unaided.
A girl looks on her engagement days as being the one rosy patch in her life, so be sure that they are rosy.
Her people send the announcement to the papers. Then you are bombarded with people who want to sell you trousseaux, trunks, wedding feasts, honeymoon tickets and all the rest of it. Photographers besiege you. It is all part of the racket.
You ask her what stones she likes for her engagement ring, and as this is such a very important thing, I would have rings sent in on approval for her to see. She will feel embarrassed if she has to walk into a shop and choose; far better have them into the home, and look at them quietly when you are alone together. A big stone is an investment. Diamonds and pearls keep up their value almost for all time. The wise man buys a second-hand stone and has it set. By this means he will get a far bigger, far finer ring, at the same price. It is worth while.
Don’t be foolish and laugh at sentiment.
It is the pressed flowers, long since dead, yet kept for their memories, which make life so very well worth while. Put pressed flowers into your romance. Don’t laugh at the man who has a dead violet hidden away in an old bureau. Sometimes a dead violet has helped someone to fight a far braver fight, and its sheer sentimentality will carry him much farther than he would otherwise have gone.
Do not forget that the day you marry, you take on a very big duty and responsibility, and that you have got to put everything that you have into making a success of marriage.
To-day it is not as easy as it used to be. Marriages crack up. There are so many outside contacts, so many entertainments, so much which is outside the sphere of the home and which is likely to carry you off your feet.
When the Victorians married, they made their home their castle, and their castle was impregnable. Wives stayed there. Their interests were all domestic and nursery. They did not meet other men, and husbands scuttled home after the day’s work was done, and shared the domestic scene in complete bliss. People looked for their pleasures and amusements into their own hearts. They did not have to go out and about to enjoy themselves. I believe that they knew the truth about living, in that real happiness is something which comes from within and not from without. But maybe you will have different ideas, and will be all ready to expend everything that you have got in the mistaken notion that you are having a good time.
Unfortunately this craze to be up and doing, to be out and about and away from the home, brings disaster to marriage. To-day you have got to give marriage more, if you want it to stay secure.
And if, at the very last moment, you suddenly know that you are making a mistake and this is not the right step to take, because you believe that it may turn out to be a mess, then don’t go through with it. Do not be influenced by people who tell you that it is too late to change your mind now, and that it would not be honourable to go back on it.
Remember that it is far more dishonourable to marry a woman whom you do not love with all your heart and with all your soul, than to back out at the last moment.
One means a nine-days’ wonder, a fuss, a little unpleasantness, but no more; the other may entail a lifetime of complete misery, not only for yourself, but for her too. Don’t ever risk it.
I wish that I could think that I would be there to help you on the greatest day of your life. I can picture myself being the first to rush off and do my best to assist you in absconding even from the very church porch. Or, shall I be a starchy old lady, with a grey fringe in front, and four chins under the only one that I’ve got to-day? In that case of course I should be sitting in a front pew, suitably shocked!
And now when I re-read what I have just written, it sounds as though I were laughing about it, when all the time I am not laughing, because I realize only too well that this is a very serious matter.
If you are not quite sure of yourself, even when it comes to the very last moment of all, get out of it. Don’t let the natural and quite understandable anxiety as to your future alarm you; most people get nervous at the last moment, and wonder if it is a mistake or not. It must be something more than that. If you have a real hunch about it, if everything that ever made the marriage seem to be such a thrill cools suddenly, and you feel that you are desperately alone, and that you can’t go on, then get out.
Nothing is so unhappy as unhappy marriage.
I ought to know that.
Always your
Mother.
SEX
Frinton-on-Sea.
January 1921.
MY DEAR SON,
I very much dislike starting a letter on this subject, because the word itself sounds so stark. Much has been written about it; too much, I think. I hesitate to offer my advice to you, yet at the same time this book of letters would not be complete if I failed to help you on the subject which is probably one of the most vital in your life.
Sex is something which starts far younger than people suppose. By the time you reach the stage of growing up, sex will already have been dominant in you for many years. I hope that I shall have the courage to treat it as a normal matter, and be prepared to answer any questions that you may ask me, without embarrassment. Because there should not be embarrassment about this, which I hope that you will remember when you start bringing up your own children.
When a child is old enough to enquire about different things, then he is old enough to have the truthful reply. To lie is absurd, because the child recognizes the lie, and immediately surrounds the whole subject with suspicion and doubt, an attitude of mind which is extremely bad.
If I am with you, I shall insist that you are always told the truth, because I shall know that the truth will be far less embarrassing for you than a lie. Sex should never be allowed to become embarrassing.
The normal man in the late teens should have some sexual experience. I suppose you may be inclined to attack me on this point, but for all that I still cling to my opinion. Purity is not everything that we have supposed it to be. You should have this experience, if only to prove to you the one fact that the emotion which poets rave about, and novelists extol, is certainly not the most exquisite in all the world.
It is over-rated.
Experience is also necessary to you because when you marry you will be there to guide a girl who knows very little of such matters and who is highly impressionable. It is criminal to think that those first impressions can be so marred by the fact that the young husband knows very little about sex. In the first few days of her marriage, the young girl goes through a complete change of outlook. Sex is a mental as well as a physical matter. If she is hurt and embarrassed mentally, it will have a reaction upon her physically.
Many a young woman whose whole marriage has been spoilt by the fact that she hated everything to do with sex would never have felt that way, if it had not been that she had been so atrociously badly handled in the beginning, and entirely through the ignorance of her husband.
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Experience in some shape or form is necessary and is normal. I suppose most mothers do not suggest it to their sons, and probably I shall have some indignant matron hurling volleys of abuse at me, because she will argue that I am egging you on to do something entirely wrong. But I am looking ahead. I have seen so many marriages marred by the fact that the husband knew too little, that sex had been treated as a mystery, and shrouded delicately from the vulgar gaze; by the crazy belief that these things ‘come to you’, when the proper time arrives.
We will imagine that you are approaching marriage. It is this that I want to write about, because so much depends on how you are going to treat the beginning of your married life.
Thank Heaven nowadays people are more open-minded on these subjects. Until the war it was considered entirely wrong, if not wicked, to contemplate any sex relationship in connection with marriage at all. One skimmed over circumstances. The young couple never spoke of the future. They walked into marriage with no previous consideration as to the reasons for which marriage was originated. You could talk about any other part of it, but never of the most important part.
To-day I consider people are much wiser, because it is necessary to find out how you both feel on these matters.
Marriage is the alliance of your two lives. Before you go into it, you must decide whether you want children or whether you do not. The old blissful arrangement of rushing hot-headedly into marriage and leaving everything to the Almighty was not the best way of getting to know one another better, and of putting your love-life on a proper footing.
Women know less of sex than do men, and this is again too often because of their mental attitude. Before marriage a girl is very unawakened; she is ignorant of much which comes to her afterwards, and it is urgent that it should not come to her crudely.
When you book rooms for your honeymoon, book a dressing-room too. You may never use it, but it is worth while to give yourselves the knowledge of sanctity and seclusion if you do need it.
Realize that marriage is a far greater upheaval to a girl than to a man. She has changed everything in her life, and has left the home that she loves, and the people who understand her, to take a step out into life with a strange young man. Because the moment that she starts on her honeymoon, you become a strange young man to her. You are in a new relationship to one another, and she is afraid.
Most girls are afraid. Therefore it is so much wiser to have broken down some of the mental barriers first, to have discovered how you both feel about these matters, and to have come closer before the engagement ends.
I think that it is the abruptness of marriage which is so mentally upsetting. One moment you are engaged with all manner of barriers and conventions between you, and the next you find that you are bound together in a new and quite bewildering alliance.
Men are always more passionate than women, and therefore they probably gain the greater joy through sex. It may be that the upbringing of girls is wrong; most of the women of my generation seem to have the feeling that sex is derogatory and unpleasant, and this is difficult to overcome. Sex should be natural. It should be the culmination of your happiness, something which you approach in a leisurely fashion and do not attempt to hurry.
Be tender and emotional, remembering that this is not something which comes about of a sudden, nor is it to be achieved because it is ‘the right thing’, but it should be a lovely surrendering of one to the other, begun in your mental relations and carried on to the physical climax.
Crudeness and haste are tabu.
Women are difficult to understand, more particularly on this subject, and I warn you you may be confused. Fear makes them bewilder you. Forgive that which you do not understand, and remember that it is your duty to learn a little about the opposite sex before you plunge into the intricacies of marriage.
I suppose if I were alive when you grow up, you would never come to me for help. I’d be labelled old fogey and you would not have any faith in me. It is curious how we never think that our parents can know anything, in spite of the fact that they brought us into this life.
I hope you will be a good husband. There are so many bad husbands in the world, men who do not mean to be bad husbands, but who, because they have never taken the trouble to understand much about the intricate piece of humanity called woman, are badly damaging both their lives.
Satisfactory marriage is the most contented thing in this world. To be in harmony with one another on the vital point is going to do more for you than anything else that you can name. It is worth approaching carefully and in all seriousness to make quite sure of your future.
Always your loving
Mother.
YOUR WEDDING
Frinton-on-Sea.
January 1921.
MY DEAR SON,
You have actually got the day fixed and all the arrangements in hand. You are going to start on your journey through life together, the invitations are out, and now you are going through that process known as having cold feet about it. There are so many things that you want to know, and there seems to be nobody whom you can ask.
It is all wrong that these, which should be some of the happiest hours of your life, are marred by anxiety, so let us talk it over and get some of the difficulties straightened out for you.
There is so much etiquette attached to a wedding, it is so fraught by what are the right and wrong things to do, that already you find yourself blundering.
It is up to her people to do the running of the actual wedding breakfast itself, so don’t fly away with the idea that it is anything to do with you. It rests entirely with the bride and her family as to whether there are to be ten guests or five hundred of them, whether it is to be a big wedding, with white satin and orange blossom, or a quiet little affair in her going-away dress. Whatever happens, it is the bride’s day, so do let her do what she likes about it.
Personally I think that big weddings are a wicked waste of money, and they do cost money too; but she may want to have one. It would be unfair to do her out of this. I think also that they are a most dreadful ordeal, both for bride and groom, but I had my big wedding, and hated every moment of it, and disgraced myself by fainting, so perhaps I bought my personal experience hardly.
The bride’s family make the plans, and you hand in a list of the people whom you want to be invited, and the invitations are sent out in the name of the bride’s parents. There are all kinds of weddings, from the champagne beano to the quite little ‘nice-cup-of-tea’ affair. But this is of their choosing.
Nearer the time, you take along any presents that may have been sent to you, and these are shown in the general display on the wedding day at her home. You are careful to attach the cards bearing the donor’s name to each gift, and you write yourself and thank by return of post. I have a hunch that you may be a bad letter-writer ‒ most men are ‒ so please do try not to forget this little courtesy.
If people ask you what you want, it is advisable to have a little list prepared, which you will have made with her help and which will include presents of all prices, so that they can make a satisfactory choice.
It is quite in order to change duplicate presents, and to do this you need not consult the donor, but get in touch with the shop where the gift was bought, and after the wedding is over and the display done with, quietly go round and swap it for something that you really do want.
For the wedding itself there will be some expenses which are yours. You will consult as to what she wants for a present, and what kind of a wedding ring she likes. Any jeweller’s shop will supply you with a bundle of rings for the size (it is considered unlucky to try on a wedding ring, and some girls are very superstitious about this); get definite instructions from her as to the type she really likes, and do follow them to the letter.
I think it is pleasant to have a tiny ‘posy’ inside the ring, some little message about your two selves, some little motto that you can carry forward into your new life; but this is all a matter of individual t
aste.
The ring is entrusted into the best man’s care on the day itself, and he hands it to you at the church when the actual moment comes to put it on the bride’s finger.
You will probably want to give her the flowers that she is to carry, and the bridesmaids’ bouquets also, having enquired first of all exactly what is required in the way of colour and variety. You have to give each of the bridesmaids a present, and in this do try to be original. Give them something which they will appreciate having, something which they will keep as a souvenir of a very happy occasion. Your father once suggested that you could give your bridesmaids an orange pip on a thin platinum chain!
Somehow I have an idea that you won’t.
You will have asked your best friend to be your best man. It is not etiquette to see your bride on the morning of the great day, you meet for the first time at the altar. This seems a ridiculous rule, but it is one about which people are extremely superstitious, so you may as well abide by it. You should get to the church about ten minutes before the bride; I think it is madness for any young man to get there early and to hang about in that ordeal. Time drags. Everything is difficult. Get there as late as you can, and wait as little as you can. It is the only way. You will be installed in the top pew on the right-hand side of the church, and a few moments before the bride arrives you will walk out into the aisle and take up your post there with your best man at your right elbow. And be in no hurry to do this. You will feel positively dreadful until she comes in, but from the moment that she enters the church, you will feel absolutely A.1.
You will not be alone together until you drive away from the church, and I do want you to remember the enormous value of those first few minutes of your married life together.
