Husbands

Aside

Reading the post Vanity Sizing by

Eryl

I was reminded of how one sometimes buys them a gift with lots of loving thoughts only to find – at worst the gift goes down like a lead balloon, or at best is looked at once and then left to moulder. Like the little book I bought MTL: – homage to husbands – ‘To my Husband – with Love’ a selection of quotes by Helen Exley. Here are some of them:-

“Sexiness wears thin after a while and beauty fades, but to be married to man who makes you laugh every day, ah , now that’s a real treat.”

I hope her husband Paul Newman recovers and they have many more years together.

Anna Quindlen wrote: _

“An enormous part of my past does not exist without my husband. An enormous part of my present, too. I still feel somehow that things do not really happen to me unless I have told them to him.”

I particularly like this by Charlotte Gray:-

“How very new you were. How could I have known, or guessed, what you’d become? I loved you dearly- but you I see now, were half unmade. And surely, that is the joy of marriage – to see Time shape the stone, to watch it carve the man. I look at your dear face, your hands, and know each stroke that made them as they are. I love each line, each altered plane. How good it’s been to share these years with you.”

A little more acerbic was the retort of the wife of John Hughes:-

“Coming across the word ‘infanticide’ in my newspaper, I commented to my wife, who was knitting and trying to follow a pattern, on the different words used to denote various types of murder – homicide, patricide, matricide , and so on. I then asked her, ‘Is there a special word used when a wife murders her husband?’

Without missing a stitch she retorted:

‘Pesticide.’”

Ring a bell?

Useful advice from the late Anne Bancroft married to Mel Brooks:-

“The best way to get most husbands to do something is to suggest that perhaps they are too old to do it!”

Here’s a Wodehouse for Shane (sidebar):-

" He’s a chump, you know. That’s what I love about him. That and the way his ears wiggle when he gets excited. Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry Sally, grab a chump. Tap his forehead first, and if it rings solid, don’t hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.”

Stevie Smith:-

“There you are you see, quite simply, if you cannot have your dear husband for a comfort and a delight, for a breadwinner and a crosspatch, for a sofa, a chair or a hotwater bottle, one can use him as a Cross to be borne.”

Tee Hee!

Here’s a heartfelt one which resonates. Catherine Cookson wrote in her book ‘Let me make myself Plain.’:-

“Don’t leave me, beloved, on this plane

Without your hand to grasp in the night

And your voice to wake me from sleep

And your love to wrap my day in kindness,

Fold on fold,

And tell me I’m young,

And that age

Could never make me old”

Louisa May Alcott who wrote my favourite book when I was a child, said in ‘Little Women’:-

“To be loved and chosen by a good man is the best and sweetest thing that can happen to a woman.”

BUT Louisa – you have to be in love with him.

One last one – for now- by Erica Jong from ‘Fear of Flying’

“Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have one friend in an indifferent world.”

Who said you had to be married to have a husband?