In our society the main purpose of the engagement is to facilitate, by allowing a certain intimacy and privacy, the testing of personalities in order to see how well suited mates are to each other. This is more important than in the case of the formation of other dyadic relations, in as much as marriage is less revocable and lasts longer than do most other pair groupings. Such a period of exploration is more important in our society than in most others because of our emphasis on individual choice of marriage partner in a social universe characterized by extreme heterogeneity of cultural elements and extreme mobility from class to class.
In societies in which there is little heterogeneity and class mobility, there is little likelihood of getting a mate whose background is radically different from one’s own, and hence the chances that any personality in a given social class will “jibe” with any other are reasonably good. It is usually in just such societies that parental judgment plays the decisive part in mate choice, thus minimizing the effects of the sexfrustrated love blindness of late adolescence which has been responsible for so many of the unsound marital choices in our society. The function of engagement for us, then, is a concomitant of our individualism and romanticism
Mutual Planning: A New Necessity
When our society was predominantly a rural one, the family was an economic unit, with each member highly important to the well-being of the whole in the matter of making a living. From a very early age children were taught to do highly useful tasks, the girls being taught to cook, to sweep, to dust, to sew, to care for babies, and the like, whereas the boys were depended upon to feed animals, to chop wood, to help in the haying and the threshing, to run errands, to milk, and what not. In short, children began, often as early as the fourth or fifth year, to do tasks which they would do for the rest of their lives.
Furthermore, they not only were preparing for adulthood, but were performing tasks economically useful at the time, a fact which greatly augmented the training process. In this situation, children were prepared, beginning at a very early age under the direct and continuous supervision of their parents, not only to perform tasks highly important in the economics of their own future family relations, but also to perform them in a cooperative way. Of the two elements of training the latter was perhaps the more important, for it taught them how to work together, and nothing is more significant in marital relations than the capacity for joint functioning, no matter what the task at hand.
Nowadays, in our largely urban society, the family is no longer the economic, religious, educational, or recreational unit of society. Today it takes far more time and patience to teach a child to do the household tasks than to do them continuously oneself. Indeed, from the standpoint of immediate efficiency there is no reason to teach a child these “chores,” for they are neither so numerous nor so onerous that the adults cannot accomplish them in a fairly short time with the help of such conveniences as vacuum cleaners, washing machines, electric mangles, and food mixers.
The shrinking size of the home and family and the lack of outside “chores,” have done their part in changing the housekeeping picture. Clothing is now mostly ready made, canning is done mainly in factories, bread is baked in bakeries. To the urban child, milk comes from bottles, eggs from cartons, and cows and chickens exist largely as illustrations in picture books. Girls seldom learn homemaking at home. In fact, even that proportion of girls who take home economics courses in high schools or in colleges is quite small.
It is a fad of our times that a young woman must act as if she never expected to marry until she is definitely engaged, and hence most young women pretend, consciously or unconsciously, that they plan to carve out careers for themselves. Those who do take home economics courses stoutly maintain that they are planning to teach or to be dietitians; and very few college students, men or women, are even so brave as to confess openly that they are studying child psychology for the purpose of being more understanding fathers or mothers.
Indeed, it may be said that our society does not adequately prepare children and youths for the roles they will be expected to play as adults. Our culture has a sharp discontinuity in patterns between those prescribing childhood and youthful behavior and those describing adult behavior. In most societies the child is inducted gradually into adult culture, in practice as well as through precept.
There is for persons growing up in these societies no sharp transition in this process which the sociologists call socialization. In our society, as it becomes increasingly dependent on a highly complicated technology and a correspondingly complex specialization in the professions, and as the home is stripped of its educational functions, there is an increasing chasm between the world of the pre-adult and that of the adult. This is as true of family living as it is of one’s professional life.
It is therefore far more necessary today than formerly for couples to prepare for marriage during the engagement period. This preparation must include a great deal more conscious planning than formerly, for those who lived a hundred years ago had developed a “second nature” regarding homemaking by the time they were ready to marry. Moreover, there are far more choices to be made by couples today than there used to be, since specialization and differentiation in every aspect of life have complicated almost every situation.
Whether to live in the city or in the country; whether to build, buy, or rent; whether to have no children, a few children, or many children; whether to live charily in order to build up security for old age or to live in the present “in order to get the most out of life”; whether to find recreation separately or together; whether to make the home a canning, baking, gardening, sewing, woodworking center of almost self-sufficient proportions (à la Borsodi), or to find a one-room apartment for sleeping headquarters only.
The final choice made in any one of these instances will reflect in no small measure the backgrounds of the persons involved. So, though it may not have occurred to you before, mutual planning is an excellent way of testing the assortativeness of the match. But mutual planning is not simply a way of testing for the matching of personalities and the backgrounds of which they are so largely products. Mutual planning is, more significantly, simply an aspect of purposive role-playing — the very stuff out of which pair solidarity emerges. And finally, mutual planning is not something which is peculiar to the engagement period. It is, rather, a most important ingredient of role-playing throughout life.
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