Just as it is very difficult to assume a graceful posture in too comfortable a chair, people easily lapse into egotism and vulgarity when they seek too much comfort in a marriage. Men or women who marry only for reasons of comfort run the risk not only of making bad mates but also of being much more unhappy than when they were single.
Ladies, if you think there is no point in bothering to cook because you only like to eat salads, if your complexion satisfies you only when you have slept all night with a clay-colored mask on your face, if you have to protect your hands by soaking them in oil and wearing gloves to bed, and if your hair is presentable only when you wear curlers during twelve hours out of every twenty-four, don’t get married! If you never get up before eleven o’clock in the morning, hate a disorderly bathroom and loathe having your toothpaste tube squeezed in the middle, if you cannot stand the smell of cigars or the sight of a triangle of bread crumbs on a dining-room chair and soiled laundry tossed in a heap in the comer, don’t get married! But if you dread solitude, are embarrassed to enter a restaurant all alone and afraid to go to the cinema without an escort, if the idea of filling in an income-tax return terrifies you and if your heart is bursting with tenderness and comprehension, if a sense of devotion wells up within you until it nearly chokes you – marry right away!
Gentlemen, if your razor is a sacred object, which you nevertheless hate to use twice a day, if you cannot bear to have your toothpaste tube squeezed anywhere but in the middle, if a disorderly heap of useless papers is to your mind evidence of efficiency, don’t get married! If you like to read the newspaper at table and if you hate to have somebody talk to you when you are watching television or driving a car – don’t get married. But if you always need to feel the presence of an audience, have a person who never forgets your birthday or even the day you first met, and all the bourgeois bliss symbolized by carpet slippers, get married right away!
But if you prefer comfort above all else, you must realize that in order to make a happy marriage it is the other person’s comfort you must seek, and not your own.