Don’t Let Others Try To Manage Your Life

From the March 13, 1934, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: We are a married couple in our 30s. Have a little home and farm which we have worked together and paid for. We are much devoted to each other and very happy.

But we have no children and our friends and acquaintances continually tell us that our home can never be a real home and that we can never be happy without children. Now we like children, but we do not miss them, and as God has not seen fit to send us any we are content and thought we were happy until people stirred us all up. Do you think it true that childless people cannot be happy?  WORRIED.

ANSWER: What’s the matter with your common sense that you have to let somebody on the outside tell you that you are not happy when you are happy and get you all hot and bothered over it?

It is the silliest thing I ever heard of. Instead of letting your neighbors’ meddling depress you, call your sense of humor to your aid and laugh it off. For how can any one else in the world know how you feel about things or what you desire or what would make you happy? Taste is absolutely individual and the thing that one person enjoys bores another to tears and what one person yearns after most the other wouldn’t have on a bet.

And, anyway, why should you let other people run your life for you? Why should you let them stick their fingers in your pie? What business is it of theirs whether you have no children at all or a litter of them? And why do you let what they say affect you, one way or the other?

It always seems to me that one of the most pitiful things in the world is the extent to which women are slaves to the chatter of other women whose opinions aren’t worth 2 cents a dozen, anyway. I know delicate, frail women who work themselves to death because they are so afraid that their neighbors will say that they don’t sweep under the beds. I know women who live beyond their means because they can’t bear for people to say they can’t give as fine parties as somebody else or they haven’t a new car.

I have known women who were actually driven into divorce by other women always telling them that they didn’t know how they could stand husbands who drank or philandered or who were grouchy.

Believe me, my dear lady, you will never be happy until you make up your mind that you are not going to let what people say influence you one hair’s breadth. No matter what you do or leave undone your friends and acquaintances are going to gossip about you, and the only thing is just to ignore it. Not resent it. [Or] you gossip about them and give them unsolicited advice. So you break even.

Whether a married couple are made unhappy or not by the lack of children depends entirely upon the individuals. There are some men and women who have the paternal and maternal instinct so highly developed in them that they are miserable without little arms around their necks, but there are plenty of other people who can take children or leave ’em, so to speak, and be equally happy, and not a few couples who regard children as brats and nuisances.

It is true that there are more divorces among childless couples than there are among those who have children, but this does not prove that the husband and wife who have children love each other better or that their marriage is happier. Thousands of couples who have actually come to hate each other and fight like cat and dog simply stay together for the sake of the children.

On the contrary, many of the very happiest marriages are childless. If a man and woman love each other, they are drawn closer together by the lack of children because they have only each other on whom to bestow their affection. They become better pals because not having any children to take care of the wife is free to give all of her time to her husband.

Do you see there is no reason to let your neighbors make you think that you are going to be unhappy because you haven’t any children. Especially when you are not.

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DEAR MISS DIX: I am working for a man who is not fresh or flirtatious, but he persists in calling me by my first name. Don’t you think that if he was really a high-type gentleman he would say Miss So-and-So? I am afraid others may think me common to allow it, but I need my job and don’t want to lose it. MAXIE.

ANSWER: Probably it would be more dignified and formal for your employer to call you Miss So-and-So, but I think you are very foolish to make an issue of this small matter or let it trouble you. This is an informal age when we don’t bother much with titles and we all Tom, Dick and Harry each other. Don’t borrow trouble.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the March 2017 issue of The Nashville Retrospect along with other articles from the city’s past, including: “Havoc Wrought By Tornado At Murfreesboro” (1913); “Against ‘Jim Crow’ Law” (1905); and “‘Inner Loop’ Formally Opened” (1972).