By George Christy

“I think every girl has difficult moments, at some time or other, in her marriage,” Donna Reed explained, recently, when the conversation turned to the difficulties of young marriages today. “A lot of girls go into marriage—I know I did—expecting marriage to make their lives perfect; to eliminate all their problems. Like a magic potion that you drink, and suddenly the world’s rosy and right.” Donna paused for a moment, then shook her head slightly. “But it’s not that way. I know now, after fourteen years of marriage to Tony Owen—and we’ve had what I’d call a happy marriage—that once in a while there’s some bitterness within that secret magic potion.

“I hadn’t thought much about marriage before I met Tony. It’s funny now, when I think about it, but I didn’t think very much of Tony when I first met him, either. He had just come out of the Army and was working for a talent agency. We bumped into each other at his office, said hello, and I didn’t think about him twice after that. In those days, I had my head in the clouds over my career. But you can’t substitute a career for deep love. Tony confessed, later, that as soon as he saw me, he knew I was the girl he was going to marry—but I didn’t know it.

“When he became my agent, we had business dealings together, and I’d have to talk to him often. We fought like cats and dogs, because I reasoned Tony should listen to my suggestions about contracts since I’d been in the film business longer than he. Sometimes he’d call and say M-G-M wanted me to make a certain movie, and I’d rant like mad. ‘You read the script,’ I’d say, raising my voice, ‘and you agreed it was terrible!’

“But Tony, angel that he is, wouldn’t get mad. He’d just say, ‘Okay, Donna, I’m with you. Take it easy now.’ After a while, I wondered if I didn’t sound a little petulant, even bratty. Finally, when he called me one day and asked me to go to a premiere with him, I decided maybe I should. After that things just kind of fell into place. I’m sure marriage counselors would have said we had no chance from the very start. Why? Because, once we started dating, I realized Tony and I were opposites—but completely!

"Tony was crazy about sports—football, basketball, anything athletic—and I shuddered at the thought of them. I adored the theater and concerts, but he couldn’t sit still watching a show or a conductor. Tony’s extremely outgoing, always friendly, he likes to be with dozens of people, while I’m more reserved, more of a stay-at-home. He thinks nothing of sitting down to a dinner with twenty-five people. As a matter of fact, he likes it. He enjoys being with people, but I always feel a little funny with large groups. I always wonder what all the people are like and if I can get along with them. Tony doesn’t think about those things. He just enjoys being in good company.

“So, you see, we started off at opposite ends. Tony was quick, garrulous, easy-going. I was quiet (except when I hollered at Tony about bad scripts), withdrawn, shy in crowds. Tony came from the big cities—he grew up in Chicago, worked there as Amusement Editor for the Daily News. But I came from an Iowan farm. My Mom and Dad, God bless them, had to struggle to make things meet. My brothers and sisters and myself all knew how to milk the cows and drive the tractors and bake bread. We were a happy family, but we were retiring. We never got out into the big-city world at all.

“I learned to live through lots of crises, during those days in Iowa, and maybe, in a way, that’s why I’m not as easy-going as Tony. He’s more matter-of-fact about life. I don’t think I’ll ever forget how Mom and Dad would stake their fortune on a crop, and maybe that season there wouldn’t be any rain or too much rain, and our corn and wheat fields would either dry up or be ruined by floods. I remember one year, when there was a drought. All our animals were dying because of their thirst. It’s the most pitiful sound in the world, hearing fifty barnyard animals sob for water. That drought lasted for nearly twelve years. We had planted tiny evergreens the year of the drought. They were one foot high, and we didn’t want them to die for lack of water. So we kids would carry water from miles away to save them, and now, today, they’re big and tall and strong. Maybe that’s why some of the more difficult moments of marriage don’t make me feel that the world is coming to an end—because I lived through those terrible days of drought and depression.

“Dad always used to tell us to have confidence, to remember there was a God in this world and that He would help—ultimately, if not immediately.

“Confidence is important in marriage. Once—and it wasn’t too long ago, either—Tony and I had an important crisis. We were separated for over three months, not because we wanted it that way, but because Tony was busy producing a picture for Columbia in Europe. I stayed in Hollywood because I had to look after our children—Tim, Tony Jr., and Penny Jane. Little Mary wasn’t born then. Each month, while he was away, passed like a year. I liked looking after the children, yes, but I just felt so alone, and I had a horrible feeling Tony would never come back to us, that maybe he might meet someone else over there and forget about us completely. It sounds foolish, I know, but it’s true. Your mind can play awful tricks on you. Maybe it’s because we women have to sit home and do the waiting.

“I didn’t have too many friends in Hollywood because Tony and I were close and I was just too busy raising our three children. I just wasn’t very active socially. Well, you may laugh, but if I didn’t have my hobby to busy myself with I’d probably have gone crazy from worry and loneliness. A woman must have other interests besides her home. I’m a shutterbug. So I took pictures every day: pictures of the children for Tony to enjoy when he came home, pictures of our white stucco house with its wooden shutters, pictures of flowers and potted plants and sunsets. I was afraid that if I brooded too long about Tony not being with us, I’d let my crying upset the children. I couldn’t let the children know how much I missed Tony, because then how could I have comforted them when they said they missed him?

“Of course, Tony wrote regularly, and I wrote him, but being all alone with the three children frightened me. Children need a father. There were times that Tony Jr. would ask me things and all I could say was, ‘Tony, this is something your Dad can answer better than I,’ but, well—I’d try to figure out something to say to him and hope it would satisfy his curiosity.

“Then, when Tony came back from Europe, I told him I just couldn’t go through such loneliness or anguish again. He didn’t seem to be nearly as upset as I was over our separation, but I think men aren’t as possessive as women. So we talked a long while and decided it was time for us to participate more fully in community life: PTA, church, civic affairs. If Tony were called away again on business, then I’d have some work in the community to keep me busy.

“I was bound and determined—if we could do it—never to let such a long separation come between us again. But, then, a year later, the strangest thing happened. We came to a point in our marriage where I wondered if…

"It happened in the kitchen, one night, after the children had fallen asleep. We were having coffee, and suddenly, the two of us got carried away with imaginative flights of fancy. Tony said if he hadn’t gotten married, he might have realized his dream to see the world. And I, being hypersensitive, began thinking maybe our marriage wasn’t really important to him, so I sulked and badgered myself into believing that Tony and I hadn’t had a happy marriage if this is what he wanted. All women feel this sometimes, I’m told, but I didn’t know this. It’s better for him to see the world than to be confined to our two-story house on Alpine Drive, I kept telling myself.

“The more I thought about it the more I became insulted, and at one point, I actually thought he’d be happier if I left him. How silly I was! Women don’t understand men sometimes; their funny moods, their unexpected conversations, their outgoing attitude towards life.

“Finally, some weeks later, after a lot of resentment had built up in me, I confronted Tony with his comment about seeing the world. I was on the verge of tears and I babbled uncontrollably about how maybe we never should have gotten married if that was all he cared about, and I told him if he wanted his freedom so badly he could have it! I’d leave him! Within minutes I was sobbing desperately, and all I had to do, once I wiped the tears away, was to look into Tony’s bright-blue eyes and I knew, deep down in my heart, why I married Tony and why Tony married me. We were in love. It was as simple as that.

“Tony put his arms around me and said, ‘Darling, why do you take everything so to heart? You know how I am. I talk off the top of my head.’

“And I realized then, that this was one of the things that had attracted me to Tony, the fact the he wasn’t afraid to say what he felt. I’d always hold things back, and I was crazy about the way he spoke out on any subject that was on his mind. He was never afraid to reveal his thoughts whether they were fleeting or deep, and I always wished I could be like him. Isn’t it odd how sometimes, we turn these very things we like in a person into things that upset us? Maybe it’s because we try to change them into our image. And this is wrong. People should remain themselves and maintain their individuality even though they’re bound together in holy matrimony. If Tony changed and became like me, then I’d probably not like him at all. I’d think he was a weakling. And if I changed and became like him, I’m sure I’d have lost some of the reserve he found attractive in me.”

Donna took a deep breath, fingered the slender gold wedding band on the third finger of her left hand. She wore a square-cut diamond ring, too. “Tony just gave it to me,” she smiled, “for our fifteenth wedding anniversary this June. He gave it to me a few months early,” she explained, “because I was so broken-hearted over losing the engagement ring he originally gave me.

“Perhaps I’ve been giving a one-sided picture of marriage. The good side is easy to know. Let’s face it, there’s nothing as wonderful as marriage, the joys as well as the sorrows, two people sharing their lives together, forever. But I think it’s wrong to make young people feel that marriage is easy. It isn’t.

“I’ve learned that there’s always a way of working a problem out if marriage means enough to the two people involved. I’ve learned too, that in marriage you just can’t be selfish and think of me, me, me all the time. Tony had to travel to Europe again on business, and I tried to be understanding about it. He didn’t stay as long, and I didn’t let myself get into that shattering depression that upset me so during his first long trip. When he returned, we talked some more and we decided maybe it would be nice if we could work things out so that, when he made a film abroad, the children and I could go with him if it were during the summer. Then, that summer, Tony told me how lonely he’d been, too, when he spent those three months in Europe. He didn’t know many people and he was always having dinner alone in his hotel room. And all the while I had been imagining Tony in Paris at a small restaurant being wined and dined, and looking so darned attractive…Sometimes, our woman’s imagination is to blame. We let it work overtime—and most of the time to our disadvantage.

"But men are men, and, I guess, we women will never understand them completely. Then we went to Europe together, and when we came back, we were in wonderful spirits. But that Christmas, there was a big studio party for all the crew and cast on the TV show. Tony didn’t arrive on time at the studio. He was busy mapping out a business thing. Everyone was with their husband or wife, and I felt kind of funny, being alone at a Christmas party. We exchanged small presents and drank eggnog and sang carols, but I just didn’t feel comfortable without Tony there, even though I knew everyone well. I guess if you’re used to having a man near your side, you just don’t feel right if, suddenly, you’re all by yourself at a party.

“I couldn’t imagine what was keeping Tony. Then, after we had a buffet supper of turkey and salad, Tony arrived. I put down my plate and ran to him, threw my arms out and said, “Hi, darling!” And do you know what? He seemed embarrassed. And I realized he was ashamed of my being affectionate in public. I let my arms fall limp to my sides; they felt like iron weights and I felt so disappointed. But then I saw Tony look at me and smile as he was shaking the hand of one of the network’s vice-presidents, and I realized a man reacts differently about showing his affection in front of others. Sometimes women expect too much. And the truth is, if the poor men conceded to us, a lot of our respect would go. They really can’t seem to win.

“After you’ve been married a while, some of the romance does go out of marriage. But what is romance? Romance is an illusion. And if a woman feels it has gone out, it is her fault—it’s in her own mind.

“One night, when Tony and I were talking about it, we looked up the word ‘romance’ in the dictionary, and do you know what it said? It said: “tendency to possess a sympathetic imagination…exaggeration or picturesque falsehood…’

“It’s not easy to keep the illusion—or falsehood—of romance alive, but it can be done even when you’re washing diapers or nursing a baby with a fever around the clock. But even if romance does go, something else grows—maybe it’s quieter, not as exciting, but there comes in a good marriage, with time, individual strength. You eventually become a person fully and grow.

“I hope I haven’t sounded like I don’t believe in marriage. I just wanted to share ‘the other side,’ the side that everybody seems to want to hide sometimes. We all have those ‘down’ moments in a marriage when we think the whole thing is falling apart. But, you know, how many of us wives, who complain, could live without marriage now? My husband and my family mean everything to me—they’re my world—and it’s a wonderful feeling to know that we’re all growing together. And, believe it or not, most of the time those difficult moments in marriage turn out to be a challenge and help both people grow.”