ing partnership would demand, specifying how many children they want to have and when, where they will live, how they will divide household duties, which in-laws might become liabilities and what to do about th.em, how much money will be coming in, as well as precisely how it will go out.

I don't pretend any couple would abide by such a contract, but simply in drawing it up they would find out a great deal about each other's unromantic expectations, for these-not sex or fidelity or love -are tlne real marriage wreckers. It is alarming, for instance, how many women race into a lifelong contract with a man whose income and earning power they do not know. Do they still expect Daddy to find out for them?

Of course, there is only one way to treat any problem inside marriage, sexual or otherwise, and it is the way to treat all the other problems: talk to each other.

But how many times has a woman written to me--a complete stranger-of a deep misery that she could not tell her husband, or that she failed even to catch his attention? There must arrive an egly momcni between every husband and wife-maybe it's a quarrel or a disappoinrment or a hurt-and if that moment drops without discussion and sinks into brooding or resentment, then it will be the seed that comes in the end to bear bitter fruit.

Admittedly, it is largely women who write to me and I do see marriage from a woman's point of view. But in this freezing of communication, I think it is often men who are the culprits. Men must talk about their feelings and men must respect the validity of women's feelings, or their marriages become just a way of getting their shirts ironed.

" When agony aunts like me talk about "working at a marriage", listening is what we mean. Listening is hard work, especially when it is to something we would rather not hear. There is no such thing as a marriage of convenience. Marriage is a cumbersome, inconvenient alliance, but it. is the only way we have of making families and therefore anyone who undertakes it has a responsibility to it. Part of the wife's responsibility is never, never to expect more from "us" Chan she expects from herself.

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