Chapter 2 - On The Way Of Understanding Marital Problems

John Smith and Betty Jones were married when they were twenty-seven and twenty-three years old, respectively, and settled down in a small town in which John had been reared and where he was now employed. He was the only son of parents with modest means. From early boyhood, he had been an outstanding student, and his parents, by dint of some sacrifices, had sent him through an excellent technical school, some considerable distance from home. After graduation, he served a kind of professional apprenticeship in a large laboratory, after which he returned to his home town to enter the employ of a small manufacturing plant devoted to the production of very high-grade products. It was then that he met Betty, one of three children of a respectable family which had moved to town while John was away at college. Betty was a quiet, pleasant, domestically inclined girl, who had gone to work in an office after her graduation from high school. About two years after John and Betty met at a church social they were married. They lived together for ten years, during which time two children were born. Then they separated, and two years later they were divorced.

Since the town in which they lived was small, almost everyone knew them. Their separation was a nine days' wonder, during which time everyone talked about it and offered his explanations of it. Later their divorce repeated the outburst of discussion. Moreover, both John and Betty refrained from any comments about their separation or divorce, or about each other, thus whetting popular speculation.

While almost everyone in town expressed an opinion, there was far from agreement about the reasons for the failure of this marriage. Betty's pastor felt that John had never been too good a husband; he had not come to church with Betty, nor aided her in rearing the children properly. A young psychiatrist in town was sure, speaking privately, that the real trouble was that Betty was emotionally immature, but a neighbor who had been reading "modern literature" said it was because John had a mother fixation. Wasn't he an only son, and didn't he stop in to visit with his mother almost every day? The town physician, an elderly gentleman given to brusque speech, made no outright comment, but most people knew that his favorite explanation for marital failures in general was sexual incompatibility. John's employer was of the opinion that John had simply outgrown Betty. John was a brilliant young man, with a bright future, he said, and Betty had never shared his scientific interests and enthusiasm. One of John's old girl friends said that Betty had a cow like expression, which clearly reflected the fact that she had no interests but cooking, cleaning, and children. An older man, neighbor to John and Betty, was sure that the real trouble was John's university training. "These young professors are misleading our children," he said, and another elder town statesman agreed that the real difficulty with modern marriages, like John's and Betty's, was the disturbance of time-honored values.

Historic Lore About Family Problems

We have told this story of the varying reactions in a small town to the breakup of a marriage because, multiplied many times over through countless years, it explains the nature and source of much of our knowledge until recently of marriage and its problems. Marriage is both commonplace and intriguing, and it is only natural that through all the ages people have observed, commented on, and interpreted the marital behavior of other persons. Many of these observations, oft repeated, become part of the collective wisdom of society.

One finds these comments in a number of places. Literary anthologies contain many case studies of marital problems or types, both in prose and poetic form. Books of familiar quotations are full of references to men, marriage, and women which are the soul of wit or the essence of insight, or both. Advice to the unwed was available before modern books which seek to prepare for marriage. There was Sir Thomas Over-bury, an early seventeenth-century English poet, who wrote:

Give me, next good, an understanding wife. By nature wise, not learned much by art.

Or there is the suggestion in the English literary classic, The Vicar of Wakefield: "I choose my wife, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well." Similarly practical is the implication in a couplet by John Marriott, early nineteenth-century writer, written more than a century ago:

The conjugal fence, which forbids us to roam,
Looks lovely when decked with the comforts of home.

Again, one might examine a great many contemporary books to find better advice than seventeenth-century Thomas Fuller's commendation of the woman who "commandeth her husband, in any equal matter, by constant obeying him," or his reference to the man who "knows little who will tell his wife all he knows." Equally pertinent for both marital partners is Robert Dodsley's (1703-1764) poetic prescription that

To prevent or heal full many a strife
How oft, how long, must man have patience with his wife.

Perhaps contemporary Will Durant had the same thing in mind when he wrote that "the right to nag is one of the consolations of matrimony."

Even the unmarried have not hesitated to contribute their sage-like observations. Thus in recent years, H. L. Mencken, long-time bachelor, advised that the way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous, but the way to lose him is to keep him a little bit more jealous.

Collections of epigrams and proverbs are particularly rife with their accumulated insights into family problems. The risk of early marriage is a favorite topic. "Early wed, early dead," ran a very old English proverb, which came to be repeated many times in various forms. Hasty marriages have been frowned upon for years. "Married in haste, we may repent at leisure," wrote William Congreve, in late seventeenth-century England. Shakespeare restated it in his play, King Henry VI, to say: "Hasty marriage seldom proveth well," and an old African proverb comes to the same conclusion in declaring that "quick loving a woman means quick not loving a woman."

Some of the conclusions of contemporary students of marriage were anticipated centuries ago in recorded folklore. How timeless is the statement in the Babylonian Talmud that "a man should first build a house, then plant a vineyard, and then marry." Benjamin Franklin emphasized this in a model of brevity when he wrote: "First thrive, then wife." Or there is the old proverb, developed in a subsequent chapter in this book, which stated: "Be careful to marry a woman who lives near to you." Equally pertinent is another old-time reminder that "for any man to match above his rank is but to sell his liberty." Or there is Franklin's sage advice to "keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards."

Some Findings of Recent Research

Modern research has reached various conclusions about marriage and its problems. These findings result from more systematic inquiries, and it is interesting to see how they compare with the ones just mentioned.

In the first group of such studies are those which concern themselves with the individual case as the starting point, either for purposes of professional treatment or scientific analysis, and focus attention upon those aspects and characteristics which are considered important for marital happiness and un-happiness. Chief among these are the psychologists, the psychiatrists, and the physicians.

1. The psychologists tend to emphasize the personal traits and personality types of marital mates. In their studies they seek to identify those which are of particular importance in the field of family relations. One well-known study, that of Lewis M. Terman and his associates, included 233 personality items, and considered 140 of them as significant in the happiness scores of husbands and wives. These dealt with attitudes,, habit patterns, interests, likes and dislikes, emotional responses* prejudice, and specific opinions. Illustrations of personality items included frequency of daydreaming, ability to take criticism, tendency to argue, feelings of loneliness, habit of rewriting letters before mailing them, self-confidence, dislike of bossy people, temper control, and the like. Contrasts in personality types of married women considered important for marital success were between the cooperative and the egocentric, the neurotic and the serene, the self-confident and the defensive, the realist and the dreamer, the benevolent and the egoistic, the thrifty and the unmethodical, and the radical versus the conservative. Among husbands, there were the contrasts between the emotionally stable and the neurotic, the self-confident and the diffident, the defensive and the domineering, the dynamic and the passive, the benevolent and the uncharitable, the methodical and the haphazard, and the radical and the conservative.

Not only are these items and types of importance by themselves, but their combination in any particular marriage is significant. There is, for instance, the case of Alfred and Polly. He is a shy, stolid, deliberate man, with slow but usually sure mental processes, and with a slow and hesitant speech. Also he is rather sensitive. Polly is sprightly and vivacious, quick in her mental processes, and gifted with an unusually sharp and ready tongue. Polly was always thinking and talking all around Al, and during their courtship this seems to have been diverting for Al. After marriage it became habitual, and before guests Polly came to take a special delight in her abilities to outshine her husband. Some six years after their marriage, upon a rather trivial pretext, Al turned upon his wife and beat her until parts of her body turned black and green and yellow. After their divorce, Al married a woman less gifted in certain respects than Polly, who appreciated Al's sureness. rather than his slowness, and who had no interest in verbal exhibitionism as had Polly. The second husband of Polly, a man with a keen sense of humor, admired her dexterities, but adroitly directed them toward objects other than himself. Both second marriages have given every indication of success for a number of years. In their emphasis upon personality traits and types, psychologists do not as a rule consider them to be the sole cause of success or failure in marriage, but they do deem them sufficiently important so that they may be used for predictive purposes. That is to say, by identifying these traits and types, and learning their role in marital relations, it will be possible to predict the probable outcome of a marriage before its occurrence. The selection of marital mates by Univac, the mechanical brain, might then be the logical next step in courtship. One might even look forward to a day when the marriage license application would bear the stamp: Approved under the seal of ' Univac. This would have the complete approval of good old Dr. Samuel Johnson, who wrote back in the eighteenth century: "I believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of the characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter."

2. In recent years, as the psychiatrists have been stepping outside of mental hospitals, they have been invading in the role of experts such {fields of behavior as juvenile delinquency, school maladjustments, industrial inefficiency, and marital discord. In this last-named area, much emphasis is laid by them,, upon emotional disturbances. These constitute, they insist, the most serious difficulties in marital relations. Of outstanding importance is emotional immaturity. In spite of our years, many of us are not grown up as persons. We act like children, they tell us. We do not know what we want. We are discontented. We do not understand ourselves, therefore we cannot understand others. Then, too, there is so often a strong tie of one or both mates to one or more members of the family in which they grew up. You have a father or mother or big brother complex. In-laws make a lot of trouble. They come to live with you, and you accept them because you are too much attached to your family. You still place your mother first. You have not been emotionally weaned. And there is another common difficulty. No disturbance threatens the success of a marriage more than the failure of one partner to keep up with the other's intellectual, emotional, and social development. So runs the psychiatric interpretation.

Since persons with character and personality disturbances are responsible for the major part of marital difficulties, hope lies, we are told, in psychiatric treatment which involves the development by the client of insight into his own deficiencies and a re-education into channels that will make for domestic happiness. From this it follows that the cooperation or resistance of the couple is decisive. If both husband and wife have a strong wish to preserve their marriage, there are few marital difficulties which, with time and patience, cannot be cured or at least ameliorated. Such is the psychiatrists' prescription.

3. The medical men have been the high priests in the field of family problems for a number of years, and even today almost half of the members of the American Association of Marriage Counselors are persons with the Doctor of Medicine degree. Prior to their growing reliance upon the psychiatric approach, medical men stressed particularly the sexual factors in marriage. Chief among these are the physical and psychological impedimenta to sex relations in marriage, sexual incompatibility, childlessness, contraception, diseases of the sexual system, and similar problems. These naturally would be the type of problems which would bring married persons to physicians, and these are the factors which the medical approach has emphasized.

To many persons, the sex act is the symbol of marital union, and sexual adjustment the essence of a satisfactory marriage. In recent years, with a growing emancipation from the prudery of the Victorian era, there has been an increased emphasis upon the importance of the sexual relation and an increased willingness to seek consciously to promote its satisfactory development. Attention to the attitudes toward sexual relations within marriage has increased, too, as well as an appreciation of the fact that the sexual role is often an expression of the personality role of the marital partner. Similarly, conflicts on the sexual level have come to be regarded as symbolic of other differences between husband and wife. In other words, both the physiology and the psychological aspects of sex are seen to be part and parcel of the same thing. Naturally, all this has made for increased recourse to the professional groups we have just mentioned.

How Much Do Personal Factors Explain?

The basic conclusion of studies and therapeutic efforts like those we have discussed, and which focus upon the personal characteristics and traits of those who fail in their marriages, is quite clear. Certain kinds of people, being what they are, are poor matrimonial bets. They tend above the average to be unhappy in marriage, desert their mates, get divorces, and in other ways show their inability to wear the matrimonial yoke. The facts which can be presented to support these views are impressive. They have been gathered and analyzed by competent persons, and nothing that follows’ is to be interpreted in any way as reflecting upon their work.

Moreover, these findings are accepted by many persons as the authoritative and final word. Have they not dealt with a great many cases? Did they not have firsthand contacts with them? Haven't they been professionally trained to do what they are doing? These are practical persons, not theorists. Who could know more about the subject than they do?

Obviously, there is a great deal of truth in this. The findings of competent persons who have dealt with or analyzed a great many cases of marital discord must be given every possible due. The very way, however, in which they obtain their knowledge has a bearing upon their conclusions. They secure it for the most part from persons who come to them for help—persons who are already married and who are facing difficulties serious enough to lead them to turn to someone for aid. The task of the professional person consulted, then, is to effect an improvement. Since he has to deal with a situation that has already developed, he must seek to work out an adjustment to it. He is interested therefore in the factors that will promote or hamper this adjustment. Thus he proceeds to counsel his clients, so that they may gain insight into their difficulties, modify their attitudes, or experiment with new ways of resolving existing conflicts.

Certain questions, however, arise. First, do these personal factors explain the high rate of marital dissolution in the United States as compared with that of other countries? Are we to assume that the people of Canada, with a divorce rate per 1,000 married couples only one-sixth as high as ours, has only one-sixth as many persons with the characteristics which make success in marriage highly problematical? Are we to conclude that England, which is more fully urbanized and industrialized than the United States, with a divorce rate per 1,000 married couples approximately one-fourth that of ours, has only one-fourth as many personal matrimonial risks in its population?

The second question that presents itself is this: Do these personal factors explain the increase in the American rates of marriage failure? In the first half of this century, the average number of divorces per 100 marriages in this country has been multiplied by almost four. Data on desertion lack the relative completeness of divorce statistics, but those that are available show an increase for at least the greater part of the first half of the century.

Here, again, the same questions present themselves. Does this mean that the number of psychological, psychiatric, and medical matrimonial misfits has increased correspondingly during these same fifty years? Obviously, no serious student would make such claims, nor admit the much greater proportion of such persons in this country as compared with other lands.

One is reminded here of some of the talk and writing about unemployment that appeared during the depression years of the 1930's. The trouble with the unemployed, we were then told, was that they were physically unfit, mentally disturbed, lazy, shiftless, and unwilling to work. Curiously enough, today, with more than sixty-five million persons employed and much less unemployment, one hears nothing of this kind. It would seem that the American labor force made a remarkable recovery in regard to its work characteristics.

Much the same thing is found in books on adolescence. We are told over and over that adolescents are what they are because they are of the age that they are. Adolescence is a sort of disease, like measles or whooping cough. The crises of this period, the unhappiness, the conflicts, the stresses and strains which afflict American adolescents are the result of physical and psychological changes in the organism during these years. Since these changes can be readily seen and since they appear at the same time that the other disturbances occur, the one must be the cause of the other, we are told. Unfortunately for this type of interpretation, the anthropologists, in their studies of societies and adolescent groups in various parts of the world, have found numerous places where these same physical changes occur but where the crises, stresses, and strains so well known to us do not appear. This, then, can only mean that the stresses and strains of adolescence are not the result of the physical and psychological changes which occur during these years, for these are relatively constant among all peoples.

We are haunted by still another question about the emphasis upon personal traits. How many of the characteristics which persons attribute to us have their sources in differences of attitudes and values? We are reminded here of the case of Laura, whose married life was filled with simmering tensions and a sort of submissive unhappiness for her. Despite many efforts of their own to work out more satisfactory relationships, she and her husband turned finally to a psychiatrist for help. Under his guidance, Laura was made aware of her emotional immaturity, her family (kinsfolk) complex, and her unusual devotion to her infirm mother—facts which her husband had long alleged against her. For several years, she sought to develop insight into her own and her husband's personality traits. Finally, by mutual consent, they were divorced.

Beyond the personalities of Laura and her husband were these facts. They differed in breeding, in family background, in interests, and in a wide range of life's values. There were those who knew them well who marveled that their marriage had lasted as long as it did.

Two years after her divorce, Laura remarried. The new husband, too, was family-conscious and devoted to his mother. Understanding Laura's attitude toward her own mother, he saw in it something to admire. Together, he and Laura helped each other in their family responsibilities, and the common experience served to bind them together. As for Laura's former emotional immaturity, the new husband's encouragement, love, and praise worked such wonders that almost overnight Laura blossomed forth as a mature, poised, well-balanced, middle-aged matron.

Suppose we consider our own behavior and/or that of our friends. When a man holds strongly to a position of which we approve, we call him a person of strong character. If we disagree with him, we are apt to say that he is stubborn and unreasonable. "My husband is rude to my friends," says the wife, and her husband may be a rude, ill-mannered person. But it is at least as likely that he is not, but that his interests and values are so utterly unlike those of his wife and her friends that he finds it difficult to be agreeable. Then, too, she and her friends may have told him so many times that he is disagreeable that he may come to think of himself as being so. "My wife is too extravagant," he says. True, she may be extravagant, measured by any normal standards, but it is equally likely that the real trouble is that they want to spend money for different things. "He is too closefisted," she says, and he may be quite miserly. It is also possible that the real issue between them is that she wants to impress the neighbors and he wants to provide for their old age. It is curious how seldom we criticize the personal traits of those who "see eye to eye" with us, and how disagreeable are the people who do not.

Some Sociological Interpretations

There is another approach to an understanding of marital problems which, instead of focusing upon the individual and his traits, concerns itself with the social backgrounds which mold personalities and create situations. It is an approach which ponders the nature of the forest rather than the pruning of individual trees. Or, to put it another way, it moves from society to individual, and from background to problem. We shall call this the sociological approach.

One such approach stresses the basic factor of change-change in the family, change in the larger society. The modern urban family has lost many of the historic functions of the family. It no longer is a producing unit, economically speaking, as in a farm society. It no longer dominates the education of the children, nor is it the center of the family's recreational activities. True, new functions have arisen, with new responsibilities, but all this has made for confusion, maladjustment, and disorganization. In addition, the role of women has been changing as millions of women, first before marriage and later after, have rushed from home to office, shop, and other areas of employment. In addition, the autocratic male head is passing and the family, now generally smaller than two generations ago, is being democratized. Time-honored controls of group conduct have weakened or disappeared as the more intimate neighborhood has given way to the anonymity of the larger city with its mobile population. Over all is the general tendency to reject old, established values and virtues for the current fashions of a secular age. In short, according to studies of this kind, the times are out of joint, the family is in a state of transition, and family disorganization on a large scale is an inevitable result.

A second-sociological approach^ emphasizes the importance of the family backgrounds and earlier family experience of those marrying. Family happiness and unhappiness tend to be matters of family heritage. That is to say, persons who have been reared in happy families form happy families in turn. Family happiness, in other words, is a way of living which one learns, just as constant quarreling seems to be. Particularly important in this connection are strong emotional attachment to both parents and particularly to the parent of opposite sex (page the psychiatrists), happy relations between the parents as well as with brothers and sisters, size of family, and social relations between the family and other persons, as in church, neighborhood activities, social organizations, and the like. A happy family, in other words, tends to perpetuate its kind, as, unfortunately, does an unhappy one, too.

A third sociological approach emphasizes the importance of similarity of social background for marital mates. The chief areas stressed are education, religion, economic status, and social class. The underlying principle here is that people pretty much reflect their particular backgrounds. Every person is a social looking-glass which reflects his or her background. Our personality in large measure is the individual side of our social setting. Our background, in other words, molds us into the kind of person we are.

From this it follows that different social backgrounds produce different personality types, with different attitudes, interests, and values; and that similar backgrounds mold persons who tend to be similar in these respects. Also, social life is organized around social interests, so that the social groups to which matrimonial mates have easy access will differ on the basis of their respective backgrounds. This leads to the conclusion, emphasized through countless ages and now reaffirmed by scientific studies, that like should marry like. And when one thinks in terms of an intimate, lifelong relationship, does this seem strange or hard to accept?

Implied in these sociological approaches are two additional-ideas that seem very important for an understanding of modern domestic problems. One is that marriage and the family do not exist in a vacuum, as we have already pointed out, but in a larger social setting of prevailing ideas, practices, and values that are commonly accepted. These comprise the ways of doing and thinking of people—their culture, as social scientists call it. What this means is that marital problems in Japanese families must be considered against the background of the Japanese culture. So also with families in contemporary China; Germany; France; Iran; Ceylon; Hollywood; Tidewater, Virginia; or Back Bay, Boston. In some areas and among some peoples, this cultural background may include the common acceptance of patterns of behavior which do not emphasize family life as an important social value, and make its wholesome development rather difficult. In such cases the rates of marriage failure would be relatively high, regardless of the personal traits of the people who live there. On the other hand, a widespread emphasis upon family life as the highest good would make for higher rates of family success.

This conclusion is supported by much historical evidence, which shows that family failure and success vary a great deal in their relative proportions through the ages. Dr. Carle C. Zimmerman, of Harvard University, has done a vast amount of research on this matter, and has found eight periods in recorded history when family life and family virtues were held in relatively low esteem in given areas of the world and where family dissolution was comparatively common. It might be added that the present era in the United States is one of the eight.

The second important idea implied in these sociological approaches is that the consistency and uniformity of family attitudes and values in a given society are very important. In a society where most persons have the same standards of conduct and accept the same social values, the likelihood of troublemaking combinations in marriage is not so great as it is in an area where there are many different standards and values, and particularly in those which have to do with the family. The United States, because of the process by which it has been populated, is a country with a very great diversity of peoples, behavior patterns, and cultural values, and therefore has its own particular hazards, as a nation, for marriage.

We have just spoken of hazards for marriage, and we wish to explain this phrase because it is particularly important in connection with the social factors which we have just summarized, as well as with much of what follows in this book.

Let us begin, by way of example, with a traffic hazard. It is located on a main highway, at a point where a much-traveled side street joins the main highway at an angle. The main highway turns shortly above the intersection. Over a period of time, a number of near-accidents occur, as do a number of minor accidents, and a few more tragic ones. All persons who know the area drive here with special care because of the dangers it presents. Statistically, thousands of motorists pass safely on the highway or use the side street; statistically, the accident rate is small; realistically, no one would deny that the intersection is an obvious hazard to safe motoring, necessitating special care from many persons.

Or consider the role of slum areas in regard to juvenile delinquency. The conditions of home and neighborhood life are plain for all to see, the rate of delinquency is unusually high; yet at no time do more than a minority of the young people of the area become delinquents. Statistically, the vast majority of its youth turns out normally; the hazard, nevertheless, is there and cannot be ignored.

We are using the term hazard, then, to mean a situation with a relatively high exposure to risk, that is, basic conditions and factors which make marital happiness relatively more difficult to achieve, which tend to create stresses and strains that make for family conflict and often for the breakup of families.

The Double Challenge in American Marital Problems

American marital relations present a double challenge to the serious student. Not one but two sets of problems must be faced. Clarity in thinking is possible only if this is kept in mind, and the succeeding pages have meaning only if this is done. One group of problems and factors are those which tend to be universal. That is to say, one finds them in substance among all peoples in all lands. These factors are chiefly personal in nature—psychological, psychiatric, we usually call them. The other group of factors concern themselves with the relatively high rate, and the increasing rate, of marital failure in the United States. It is with this second group that we are concerned chiefly in this volume.

It should be clear, then, that we do not mean to depreciate in any way the importance of personal traits and characteristics in marriage. People differ markedly in respect to these, and the very nature of family life sharpens and underscores these differences. There are people who could live peaceably with almost everyone, just as there are those who would be a trial to any mate. We merely make the point that personal factors are relatively constant and fail to explain our historic increase in marriage failure or our record in comparison with that of other countries.

In like manner we appreciate the disturbing effects of many social changes, the new problems which they create, the inevitable lag in dealing with them that ensues, and the subsequent disorganization in many areas of the social order. Equally important is the role of family backgrounds and experiences by which good and bad marriages tend to perpetuate themselves in succeeding generations.

However, as we have listened through the years to various persons reveal their marital woes; as we consider the wealth of individual cases from other sources that are available; as we review group discussions which usually begin with concrete examples and then invariably proceed to more general factors; as we seek to digest the many statistical studies, and try to fit together the findings and symptoms which they set forth—we find ourselves driven invariably to a relatively few basic social factors in American life which seem always to appear in the ultimate background of our marital problems. Some of these are common American practices in mate selection, others are characteristics of the national life as a whole, while still others concern emphases with existing families. All represent life values which are peculiar in varying degrees to the American people.

There has been a curious reluctance in our current thinking to face the fundamental importance of values and value judgments. Hard-boiled scientists in particular shy away from values and value judgments. One of their common clichés has been that science has nothing to do with values and value judgments. But how, one wonders, can anyone study life, individual behavior, social achievement, and the whole gamut of human activity, and avoid these obvious mainsprings of conduct? How else can one understand human behavior except in terms of human values?

It is in regard to these values that we differ from each other, that whole nations differ; it is in what people really accept as the desirable, the fitting, the good, the proper, and their opposites, that we have the keys to the ways in which they live and work and hope and pray. It is in these values in the field of family life that we must look for much of the explanation of America's record in family behavior. Three groups of values are particularly important.

1. Some of our current values and practices make for bad marriages—marriages that never should have been consummated to begin with, and whose outcome seems almost destined to end in failure. We are reminded here of an elderly friend of much wisdom, to whom we shall refer henceforth as the venerable sage, who has occupied himself for many years by forecasting the outcome of marriages of persons whom he knows. His forecasts are based on three criteria: (1) length of time the couple has known each other, (2) his knowledge of their families, and (3) the similarity or dissimilarity of their interests. He insists he seldom, if ever, fails.

 Many persons today insist that our record of marital failure  is due to unwise marriages, and that divorce, desertion, and separation will not lessen until we learn better how to marry. With this conclusion, we find ourselves in substantial agreement, and subsequent chapters will make clear our reasons for doing so. The simple fact of the matter is that we marry with fewer preparatory rituals and sobering ceremonial features than other and older nations employ to conserve the sanctity of the marital rite.

It is our conviction that certain time-honored procedures in courtship are still essential, for courtship is the experimental prelude to marriage; that the prospective mate must not be viewed solely through the colored lens of romance; that marrying your own kind is still important, since marriage remains life's most intimate and pervasive relationship; and that marriage should occur at an age when there is sufficient experience and maturity to make a reasonably wise choice.

2. Other values which are common to American life do not make for family continuity and stability. We are thinking here principally of our national devotion to individualism and the open-class system. Marriage above all is not a one-way street, leading only to one mate's comfort and satisfaction; and our open-class social system, geared to an individual social aggressiveness, runs counter to the goals of family continuity and responsibility. These points of view are elaborated in Chapters 7 and 8. We do not mean to say that the values and practices which result in unwise marriages and which weaken successful adjustments in marital relations invariably destine marriages to failure. Rather do we think of them as creating hazards in marriage in the sense in which we have already defined that term.

3. Finally, there are the old-fashioned values of parenthood and family group living. These are positive values which have been underemphasized during the past several generations. There are some indications of a reverse trend in regard to these, but we still have a long way to go to give them an importance such as they had in past periods when family life flourished on a much broader scale than is the case today. Chapters 9 and 10 are devoted to a discussion of the constructive values of parenthood and the family as a project in group living.

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