Mate Selection and Marriage By Paul H. Landis; McGraw-Hill
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In more stable societies the problem of marital adjustment is largely a matter of making adjustments to the established institutional system. In our culture the institutional structure itself is changing, so that its objectives and demands are poorly defined. The traditional family was an institution that had (1) permanent pair relationships and (2) offspring, as its accepted objectives. The first assured the lifelong settling of the problem of mating for the individual; the second assured the perpetuation of the blood strain, as well as the social heritage of the family through the generations.
Today even these basic objectives are by no means clear. True, the idea of permanence of the pair relationship still has considerable sanction and is without doubt the dream of every young couple who become deeply involved in love, but at the same time there is the reality of impermanence in the mate relationship in our society where one in six marriages voluntarily are broken before death takes one member of the pair. This uncertainty is so well recognized that many youth look forward to and consider marriage with a sense of trepidation and fear, lest the venture will prove a costly mistake and end in failure.
In the realm of basic emotional and biological drives, youths crave in marriage exactly what their grandparents craved. The difficulty is that the social setting in which the family finds itself makes them a little uncertain that they will be able to realize a permanent and satisfactory emotional and biological union.
That the odds of marriage are actually pondered by many young people today is clear. The following brief excerpt from a student paper illustrates the nature of some of these queries:
Reading and observation have convinced me that marriage in order to be lasting must be a union of mutual interests because infatuation and glamour wear off. There is nothing in my family relationships to make me believe that the marriage state is undesirable, but present trends reveal that a mate must be chosen with more care than ever before. In spite of religious training, I believe divorce to be preferred to unhappiness. As for companionate marriage, I am too conservative to have a broad-minded opinion of it as yet, I feel. If both men and women were on the single standard, there would be more marital bliss.
Children are no longer taken for granted; they must be weighed with other goals, objectives, and values. Having children may interfere with the attaining of these other goals.
Bell obtained views of 11,707 youths in Maryland on this question of number of children desired. Over a thousand wanted no children at all. The majority of a group of 500 college students covered by another study expressed a desire for two children. As many wanted either one or no children as wanted three children. Other studies of high school and college show a similar predominating desire for small families, with some adolescents and youth wanting no children at all.
Throughout history, mating has been under the direction of adults--a hired matchmaker, parents, the wife's brother or uncle, almost anyone but the individual himself has had something to say about whom he married. The development in the United States of a highly romantic conception of marriage and the family, along with the trend in Western civilization toward increased mobility, has gradually led to turning the choice of a mate over to young people. As a consequence, rather than the choosing of a mate for qualities that are likely to wear well, the family being thus built into a permanent institution, the objectives of marriage and the family become a romantic holiday rather than progeny.
America appears to be the only country where love is a national problem. Nowhere else can one find a people devoting so much attention to the relationship between men and women. Nowhere else is there so much concern because this relationship does not always make for perfect happiness.
There is considerable evidence that leads us to suppose that our worthy ancestors in America held romance in less esteem than parents do at the present time. They saw to it that the son's "gal" was more than a "lazy good-for-nothing" who could not so much as bake biscuits and were shrewd enough to see that the daughter was courted by a lad whose father had at least an "eighty" or, better still, a "quarter section" of land. Practical considerations loomed large in the choice of mates in the stable rural society of yesterday.
THE EMOTIONAL TRANSITION OF ADOLESCENCE
The roots of emotional life are in the parental family; they remain there throughout childhood, the parents and siblings being the natural center of emotional attachment. During adolescence there must be a gradual and normal shift of the deeper emotional attachments from the family focus to members of the opposite sex. The ultimate attainment of emotional maturity depends in large part upon the effectiveness with which the adolescent succeeds in making this transfer of his deeper emotional attachments to a member of the opposite sex. Those who fail to make this transfer and who remain permanently "tied to the mother's apron strings," or too much attached to the father or to a brother or sister, fail to achieve the kind of emotional maturity that is necessary for establishing a new independent family.
The transfer of love attachments to a focus outside the family need not be complete but must be fairly so. Some individuals make the transfer sufficiently to marry but still cling too tenaciously to the family and revert back to it for emotional satisfaction in every marriage crisis. The daughter who is constantly running back to mother, or who has to have the father or mother move into the home, and the son who must always remain with his mother even after marriage are examples.
Since the days of Freudian psychology, much has been made of these abnormal attachments of child to parent or parent to child, which may hinder an individual in a decision favorable to marriage or may interfere even after marriage has taken place. We have all known the youth whose first consideration in deciding whether or not to marry, or even to leave home, is whether or not it will "hurt" the father or mother. The young person should never have to apply this test to his decision concerning marriage. Parents who are themselves mature and face life realistically should be ready to permit their children to go when these major transitions in life come. The fact remains nonetheless that many sons or daughters are not able to leave the nest without a struggle against childhood emotional attachments.
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