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| Once I was a Nun continued on page 21 |
The Enemies of Marriage
'They tell me I'd be better writer without this family of mine. But if I can't be a goof wife and mother as well the I won't write.' says Monica Dickens
ONE should by now have got over weeping for the broken marriages of film stars. Heaven knows there are enough of them to make it merely routine news.
But I don’t know. Somehow it always strikes me as desperately pathetic, for the poor things seem so helpless. They never really had a chance.
The life of a popular star is not at all conducive to peaceful married happiness. The strange hours, the emotional demands of acting, the flying back and forth across the Atlantic.
The strain of always looking your best. The public face that must never be allowed to slip. The dog-eat-dog battle to get the parts and to stay at the top-which, with the young ones coming up all the time, can be a harder struggle than actually getting to the top.
The dangerous ones
FOR a woman to be a star is a full-time job. How can she find time to work at being a wife?
And there is one menace which gets in the way of domestic happiness even more obstructively than her star status---the most dangerous enemy of all.
People. That's what the menace is. The people who, subtly or openly, deliberately or unconsciously, are out to destroy her marriage.
Anthony Steel, talking wistfully of the collapse of his marriage to Anita Ekberg, said:
"It was Rome that broke it up. You know how those Italians behave with women. Always telling Anita how much better off she'd be without me."
Now you can see why I say film stars are pathetic. With too much money, too much overblown acclaim, they get so out of touch with the realities of life that they are at the mercy smooth talkers.
Countless stage and film marriages have broken up because the wife's career takes her among people more interested in her than in her husband. Because she is more useful to them with no domestic ties, these people try subtly to persuade her that she is a better person on her own.
Here we get the pathos again. The poor woman is so bemused by being told how wonderful she is that she begins to believe it.
That is when her marriage begins to fall apart at the seams.
Even I, with my limited achievements in a far less glamorous field, have had my share of this sniping.
There have been those who have tried-unsuccessfully, I hasten to say, and never in this office, I also hasten to say-to spoil my very happy marriage.
Don't fall for flattery
BELIEVE me, it's not pleasant. I have been told I give too much time to my home and children and not enough to my typewriter. I have been assured that if I don't put work before family I am doomed to eventual oblivion.
I am told-and this is the sort of flattery that the vulnerable film stars fall for-that I am an 'artist' and that an artist can never be like other people. That an artist has a greater duty to himself than to anyone else, and should never be tied down by mundane responsibilities.
Tears - and the truth
I WON'T listen to this sort of stuff. I hate it. If I can't be a good wife and mother too, I won't be a writer. But I know I can do both, and, so help me, I'm going to show 'em that I can. All the same it hurts, the sniping. I have been seen in floods of tears in a London restaurant after an attack like this, even while my husband was sitting at the other end of the table. We took, his rage and my distress home before the coffee.
Only afterwards, discussing it more calmly, did we realize that two of those who had attacked me were themselves unhappily married, and the third was drifting, rootless, rich and lonely after his third divorce.
It isn't only when the wife has her own career that snipers get to work. This sort of jealousy can be the enemy of any happy marriage. And the enemy is everywhere.
The way to happiness
UNHAPPILY, the 'enemy' can even be a parent. A mother's interfering: "You shouldn't let him talk to you like that," or: "Why do you give in to him?" may perhaps be well intentioned, but it's very dangerous.
It's trying to drive a wedge between you. Only a tiny one; but once a wedge is in place a few more blows soon knock the breach wider; too many parties; other men or women attracted by one of you who, seeing your marriage is happy, try to break down your unity.
Then there are people who take up one of you but are not interested in the other. Never let this happen, These dangerous people must take you both together or not at all. If they won't, then cut them out of your lives.
Keep your individuality, by all means; but remember you cannot keep your independence. If you believe independence is essential in modern marriage, try it; but don't expect to have the happiest and most secure of marriages.
You can't, You can only have that when a man and woman ignore the sniping voices and the subtle enemies and stick closely together to present a united front against the jealousies of the world.
ANOTHER ARTICLE BY * * MONICA NEXT WEEK
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