One of the commonest evidence that a person has not yet developed full maturity of his personality is the tendency to give way to fits of temper. Most husbands become angry whenever they did not get their ways or whenever something happened that wounded their sense of personal pride. Some husbands not only speak most unkindly to their wives but resort to threats and sometimes throw their shoes at the women or whatever other objects that may be handy.
Some women are also capable of uncontrollably anger. Some become angry when their husbands forget to fulfill some promises made. The commonest cause of anger is keeping of late night by their husbands because it is believed that they must have been with other women.
Moods are hard to define, but everybody experiences them. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines mood as the state of one’s feelings or mind at a particular time. They provide the setting for all conscious mental process. They influence thoughts and reactions. They give color, sometimes brilliant ones and sometimes dull ones to everything that happens. In order to be able to handle your moods, the first rule in a successful marriage is to be sure that you are grown up emotionally. Marriage is for the mature minds, not the infantile.
The fusion of two different personalities requires emotional balance and control on the part of each partner. Practically all cases of temper date from early childhood. Habits are formed more quickly when we are young, but if we have already passed the youthful flexible period it is now time to put our temper under control. Some had throughout childhood had indulged in their temper as a mean of coercing their parents into cooperating with them. They had frequently gotten their way by throwing tantrum whenever, their will was crossed.
This same tendency followed into their adolescence with very little change. Even during their young adult years they still used their fits of temper as a means of demanding their own way. As they married they found that their reaction to having their will crossed remained the same as when they were children.
The only difference was that some spouses were unwilling to give in to their partners’ tantrum as their parents had been. Some wives had certain strength of their own and had not been willing to accede to their husbands, as their parents used to, by giving in allowing them their ways simply because of the threat of a fit of temper.
Even in the same individual moods vary from elation to depression. Some people are elated more than they are depressed; others seem to be depressed most of the time. During the elation period one feels as if he were walking with spring in his steps. During elation you hold your chin up; see the humor in trivial occurrences and see the bright side of the more serious happenings. You have courage, energy, and optimism. You feel fine and act it.
When depressed, you walk slowly and look toward the ground. You smile only occasionally, and then with apparent difficulty. You see a tragedy in every problem. You lack perspective, feel discouraged, and sometimes wish you could just die. Nothing seems right. The sun either is too hot or the cold is too penetrating. There is even a tendency to suspect the motives of others.
Some people experience sudden changes in mood. Some people’s mood change so often that it is hard to predict when they are cheerful and when they are downcast. When cheerful, such a person is sociable and one feels that I have met a friend. When downcast, he may even ignore old acquaintances, even his wife, who wonders, “What have I done now?” Everyone experiences these fluctuations of mood, even though the extremes may not be very common. Of course, the events of the day have their influence on your mood. The businessman who completes an important job feels like treating his wife to a sumptuous dinner; but he is likely to ignore his wife greeting when he returns home, if he has failed to win a major contract he has been going after for many months.
Your physical condition also has a great deal to do with your moods. When you come back from work feeling worn out you tend to feel downcast, whereas you will feel buoyant when you just returned from a vacation.
But even though the day’s events and the state of health have a profound influence on your mood, there is still another factor that has its effect. This is the tendency toward cyclic alterations. When emotional is abundant you feel elated and ready to accept challenges. During its ebb you tend to be depressed.
By their very nature, moods are hard to analyze. So it is not surprising that most people are not aware of the rhythmical nature of their moods. But the keeping of a simple record will convince you that your moods do come and go in a wavelike manner. Once convinced, a period of depression will seem much less difficult to handle than when it was supposed that moods depend entirely on the day’s happenings only. With this insight a period of depression will be less devastating knowing that a feeling of well-being will soon follow. Moods can be taken in stride. The high price to pay for uncontrolled temper is losing the esteem of your partner, and setting such an example before your children portend the danger that they would lose their respect for you and their own personalities would suffer as the result of the unhappy home environment.
It had been observed that a person is most apt to give to temper when life is stormy and all seems against him, that is when he resorts more to anger. On such occasions his store of nervous energy and his ability to exercise self-control is at low ebb. You should therefore adopt the definite policy of delaying the settlement of any difficulty until such time as you are calm.
The control of grievances which tend to build up in a person’s mind until he finally becomes very angry, that he imagines all kinds of retaliation. This pent-up antagonism is a potent producer of trouble and should be dissipated before one finds occasion to take his partner to task. One of the best ways of relieving this pent-up emotion is to engage in some profitable and enjoyable physical exercise. Visiting of friends and taking a walk can work wonders and making you more tolerant of those who have provoked you. Every time you succeed in controlling your temper you break the chain that enslaved you.
In order to help create a happy home, wives should treat their husbands kindly and avoid rebuttal whenever they felt ill at ease and tempted to a fit of anger. This is not with the thought of giving in to his whim, but simply in recognition of the principle that when an angry outburst is met with calmness and patience, the flurry of anger soon passes, curbing the tempted one to regain his composure and consider the immediate situation impartially and unemotionally.
It is reasonable to suppose that many of the marital tragedies have occurred when the parties concerned were in the troughs of their temperamental cycles. This is the time that life appears most gloomy. This is the time when couples are less tolerant of each other. This is the time when divorce proceedings are initiated. This is the time when, for no provocation at all, a young lady may tell her suitor not to call again. If people would delay their important decisions until their moods shift to their optimistic phases, there would not be so many lovers jilted, and there would not be so many divorces and separations.
Moods have an important bearing on the relationships within the home. When a husband is in the depressed phase of his temperamental cycle, he is less tolerant of his wife than when he feels elated. The same thing goes for the wife. It is bad enough when just one of them at a time feels downcast. But when husband and wife get the blues on the same day, things are in danger of becoming pretty stormy.
The cultivation of a sense of humor is one of the most effective way of combating this situation. If the habit of seeing the funny side of things is built up during the crests of one’s temperamental waves, it will carry over the troughs of these same waves and help the couple maintain an even keel.
The trick of seeing the funny side of things works very well in controlling depressed moods. But to develop the conviction that you are capable of rising above life’s vicissitudes is a way to provide the stimulus for a happier outlook. The only wise course is to decide in favor of buoyancy and optimism.
Another way to maintain temperamental poise is to resolve that moods will never interfere with your usual way of life. The natural tendency is to suspend activities when you feel depressed. Happy home have been created by couples that have learned to control themselves. The control of anger is the ability to analyze the causes of your difficulty rather than to react with a fit of anger. Anger is like a parasite that grows with the growth of the supporting body, and, like a parasite, it can be killed by separation and crushing.
