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"This is the ideal, the 'happy ending' at which most romances, novels, plays, and all the daydreams of youth leave us. Warm, cozy, intense domesticity,--where passion is legitimate and love and friendship eternal; where children play around the hearth fire; of which death only is the ending!

This ideal is not realized largely because no ideal is. How often is it closely approximated? Experience says seldom. That implies no reproach against marriage, for we are to judge marriage by the rest of life and not by an ideal. A world in which great wars occur frequently, in which economic conflict is constant, in which sickness and disaster are never absent; where education is occasional, where reason has yet to rule in the larger policies and where folly occupies the high places,--why expect marriage to be more nearly perfect than the life of which it is a part? To be reasonably comfortable and happy in marriage is all we may expect."


~ The Nervous Housewife, by Abraham Myerson, M.D., 1920

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