MICHIGAN HISTORY SERIES

ANN ARBOR—’Tis spring. And as the saying goes, “’tis the season when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love.” But that young man is not the only one who thinks such thoughts. Spring often brings the same thoughts to young women–thoughts strong enough that in 1854 The Farmer’s Companion and Horticultural Gazette’s “Ladies’ Department” published an article by Julia Moser on how to “Make Your Husband Happy.”

Subscribed to by Michiganders across the state, and found among the holdings at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, The Farmer’s Companion article outlines the skills and practices necessary for a wife to keep her husband “happy.” There are no punches pulled here. The brides, be they new or seasoned, are admonished not to appear before their husbands with a “long or dissatisfied face,” a demeanor that, before marriage, the suitor would never encounter. If courtship conduct takes a dramatic turn after marriage and the wife becomes “careless in dress and manners,” then the wife is cautioned that her husband might “look elsewhere for enjoyment and happiness.”

In a later article that same year, the publication ventures into how to “Make Your Wife Happy,” and questions the truthfulness in never demonstrating a “long or dissatisfied face.” Another article from “one who has been a wife for 27 years” encourages a couple to learn to “sympathize, and feel an interest in everything that concerns the other, and in turn let each strengthen and support the other, that you may be happy yourselves, and spread the influence of your happiness around you.”

Be all this advice as it may, a U-M researcher has found that idealizing the marriage or romantic partner may be the key to enduring happiness. U-M psychologist Sandra L. Murray says, “Seeing what one wants to see, it turns out, is more satisfying than seeing romantic partners as they really are, both in dating relationships and in marriage.”

Murray cautions that the findings of her study do not mean that people should pull the wool over their eyes, denying faults and character flaws in romantic partners. Rather, she suggests, seeing a partner’s faults in the best possible light may provide the security and optimism necessary to confront difficulties in the relationship and eliminate that long face or search for enjoyment elsewhere.

“Illusions may create resources of goodwill and generosity,” Murray notes, “that prevent everyday hassles from turning into significant issues.”