Most of the marriages from now until 1955 will involve veterans of World War II. It is probable that at least eight million veterans will marry by then. During these years our marriage rate is expected to be the highest in our history.
For this reason, if for no other, it is pointless to make any special problem of the veteran, as so many people are trying to do. It is true that war changes men, but it also changes the girls who stayed at home—and for that matter the men who happened to stay at home. There is no need to discuss the question, “Should a girl marry a veteran?” because most girls will marry veterans anyhow, and there is no reason why they should hesitate.
But what we will do now is point out some of the changes that occurred while the man was away so that the veteran and the girl can understand each other better.
In many ways the veteran is a better prospective mate than when he went away. He may have acquired some good habits in the Army: getting up on time, taking care of personal belongings, orderliness. His horizon may have broadened and he may have learned to be more tolerant. He probably has matured beyond his chronological age. He has learned a great deal about loyalty to a cause, perseverance and patience, all of which will help make him a better mate. Often he has achieved a needed emotional independence from home and mother. He has become practical and very realistic.
Most important of all, perhaps, he learned while away to appreciate the value of marriage and the home. He yearns more than anything to settle down in some quiet place with a nice girl and raise a family. He has had enough running around and being at loose ends.
The veteran, of course, has lost and gained certain skills, he may seem crude and he may appear to have lower ideals and standards. He worries a great deal about the future, is somewhat unsure of himself in some civilian situations. Ernie Pyle the late, famed war correspondent pointed out some of these changes when he wrote:
Our men can’t make the change from normal civilians into warriors and remain the same people. Even if they were away from you under normal circumstances ... they would not come home just as you knew them.... They are bound to be different people from those you sent away.... They are rougher.... Killing is a rough business.... Language has changed from mere profanity to obscenity.... They miss women.... They expressed longings.... Their whole conduct show their need for female companionship.... Money value means nothing to them.... A man learns to get what he needs by “requisitioning.” It isn’t stealing, it’s the only way to acquire certain things.... War puts old virtues in a changed light. We shall have to relearn a simple fundamental or two when things get back to normal.
The standards of fighting men are those of men living without women, of men who have lost many of the moral values of our normal living. If they hadn’t lost them they wouldn’t have been good killers. Some of them have feelings of guilt and remorse from cheap women they have known. Others are shy and withdrawn because they have had long periods of isolation away from women.
As a result of the war many veterans have open or subconscious conflicts involving weakened morals, shattered values, duties to others, “debt” the government owes them, opportunities they have missed, war injuries or handicaps they incurred. They are bothered about whether to return to school ... whether to go back to the “old” sweetheart ... whether to remain in the Army. Some have feelings of inferiority as they try to make their way into a strange world or return to an almost forgotten world. In the Army or Navy they learned to let others take the responsibilities and the initiative. They made fun of the “eager beavers” and learned to regard “goldbricking” (evading hard work) as a virtue. But in civilian life, ambition and hard work are two of the great virtues.
In addition to all these issues to worry them, they face the job of deciding what to do. In one survey of soldiers, about seven per cent said they would return to school on a full-time schedule with or without government aid. Another twenty-eight per cent said they would go back to school if government aid was provided. That makes thirty-five per cent who hope to go to school. (But many of them probably won’t.) Most of these hoping to return were under twenty-five. About half of all the men hoped to return to their old job or to a new job in their same community.
The average veteran has four alternatives of action: He can go back to school; he can go back to his old or a similar job; he can go into a job for the first time; he can select a new field of work. Most of them want a vacation, a wife, and a job, though not necessarily in that order.
Some of the men will have feelings of insecurity. Some of them have never worked before. They are asking themselves: Can I get a job? Will my old job be waiting for me? (This particularly disturbs men who are being released relatively late.) Is my girl going to marry me? Was she loyal to me while I was gone?
If you are a girl considering the possibility of marrying a veteran, here are thoughts you might keep in mind.
—You must assume he is a normal person and treat him like one. Even if he doesn’t seem to be he should make the adjustment to civilian life within a few months.
—Don’t confess any “misdeeds” of your own—they will only upset him and add nothing either to the present adjustment or future happiness.
—Talk out your problem, your futures, carefully and in detail. This will help both of you be sure of the responsibilities you face in marriage and will cause both of you to plan systematically and not haphazardly about the future.
—If you agree to marry, go ahead and be married in church with a conventional ceremony with all the trimmings. Unless he is terribly opposed, don’t be contented with less than a church or home wedding with the friends and families of both present. Studies have shown that marriages that took place within the sanctity of the church tend to be happier than those that do not.
—In dealing with him during the first few weeks don’t tell him what to do or where to go. Make him feel relaxed, encourage him to wait on you, make him feel useful.
If you are a returning veteran you should accept the fact that you are going to find your girls different from when you left. And it won’t be all aging. They have been working in greater numbers than ever before and on the surface are more independent. In spite of this, remember that girls want to be treated gently and considerately. They still love soft lights and sweet music, they want to hear your compliments, they want that tender good-night kiss if they like you, and that romantic conversational interplay.
You must not forget that you have been away a long time. You may find your feminine psychology rusty. Girls are still soft and sentimental, still wanting to be made love to, still wanting to marry and make homes and have your children. Don’t let the inhumanity of war make you cynical. Such an attitude would keep you from finding the mate with whom you can be happy.
Will you pick your mate or will she pick you? Because of the surplus of women over men now you can do the picking. You don’t have as much ground for wondering whether you will marry as the girls do. But will you pick your own mate? Probably not. It has been said: “A man rushes after a woman until she catches him.”
Actually, picking a mate nowadays is a mutual process; both of you pick each other. It is a complicated process and probably neither of you knows quite what is going on. Part of the time one of you may be more aware of what is going on than the other; part of the time neither of you is sure.
What kind of a mate should you look for? These things have been covered in detail in previous chapters. However here are a few thoughts that take on particular pertinence when applied to veterans. Ask yourself:
Will she make me a good wife? Can she cook, sew, run a home? Is she the sort of girl I would like to have as a mother of my children? Will she wear well? Don’t pick her just because she is glamorous because glamour and good looks are largely cosmetic processes anyway. Is she selfish or is she considerate of me and my well-being? What are her good traits? What are her poor traits?
Don’t marry a girl who has traits that are opposite of your own unless she is opposite only in good traits which you lack. For example, if your own parents were unhappily married, pick a girl whose parents were happily married. If you feel unsure of yourself, pick a reliant, confident girl. If you are quite irritable, be sure to get a mate who is definitely tranquil.
What about the men who have been physically or mentally hurt by the war? Should a girl shun a man who has a war injury?
In World War II, which lasted some forty-four months, casualties of one sort or another exceeded one million men, with nearly three hundred thousand lives lost and with fifteen thousand veterans losing an arm or leg or more members of his body.
To learn how girls would feel toward marrying injured men, the senior author asked five hundred girls whether they would marry veterans with any of thirty-three different types of war injuries. The injuries included such things as loss of speech, loss of two eyes, complete deafness, recurrent malaria, loss of hair and eyebrows due to burns, several fingers missing, injuries to head including replaced nose, ear, teeth and jaw. Many of the girls queried were engaged to servicemen.
It was interesting to note that older girls showed a greater willingness to marry injured men than the younger girls. This may be due to the fact that the older girls are more concerned about their chances of marrying. Also, engaged girls showed a greater willingness than unengaged girls. The reason for this may be that engaged girls know the capabilities of their fiancés and can see how their men could be successful at a job and marriage in spite of an injury.
Of the thirty-three injuries, only four were checked by the majority of engaged girls as serious enough to impel them to withdraw from their engagements. Those four, in order were:
While, as you notice, these fiancées felt extremely reluctant to marry a man who had lost his sexual potency, only a small proportion (16%) would refuse to marry an ex-soldier who had become sterile. Inasmuch as most of the engaged girls would not marry a man who had become sexually impotent it is clearly evident that sexual activity is regarded in a far different light than having children. Most of the girls would marry if they could have sex even though there were no possibility of conceiving children.
When the unengaged girls were queried, eight injuries were listed by the majority, including the four mentioned by the engaged girls. The additional four were:
It was interesting to note that neither group showed a majority opposing blindness. Also, note that these girls listed loss of limbs only where they were not replaceable. Most girls professed willingness to marry men if their lost limbs could be replaced by artificial ones. All of the girls seem to have been deeply impressed by the progress made in rehabilitating the injured. Many had seen the amazing results with their own eyes and so had lost their fears about marrying men with such injuries.
Probably seventy-five thousand returning veterans may have hearing impairments. But with hearing aids or lip-reading, most of these men can be fairly normal within a few months.
Even though a girl hesitates about marrying an impotent man, much of impotence is psychologically caused and if so is curable. Furthermore the newer sex hormones science has discovered are wonder workers.
Here are a couple of precautions that should be observed in marriages involving injured men:
—No girl should marry a veteran because of pity. It should be for love.
—No veteran should hesitate to marry just because he has a defect, providing the two love each other, one of them (preferably he) can make a living, and providing they have discussed the handicap and both understand its nature and limitations.
—They should give themselves a waiting period, just as any other two people who have been separated should do, for say six months before marrying.
—Remember that few people are one hundred per cent perfect physically. Under usual conditions, eighteen per cent of our working population has a definite physical defect or chronic disease. Of our war handicapped, it is believed that some eighty per cent can be placed, by careful selection of jobs, in work where they can be happy and just as productive in that particular job as they would be without the handicap. Another twelve or thirteen per cent will need rehabilitation before such placement can be made. Another five per cent will need extensive rehabilitation and even then will have to be placed in “sheltered” work.
What about the psychological casualties of war? Here we do have a real problem. Before the end of the war a third of the Army’s discharges were psychoneurotic cases of one form or another. But you should also remember that about one-sixth of the men rejected by the draft, the 4-F’s, were rejected for neuropsychiatric reasons. The fact is that close to one-fourth of all the single men in this country are maladjusted to some extent. This helps explain the terrific rise in the rate of divorce.
Psychoneurosis is a broad term covering “combat fatigue,” “war nerves,” ulcers and other psychosomatic disturbances. In World War I it was misleadingly referred to as “shell shock.” Don’t feel there is something lacking in a veteran who suffered a psychological breakdown because the facts show that unskilled “bad eggs” are less likely to break down than the men who had good records in clerical or skilled jobs in civilian life and were exemplary in their military conduct. Some of the factors producing breakdown in war service were long-continued tension, repeated expectancy of injury or death, terrifying experiences, loss of comrades in war from battle, excessive physical fatigue, insufficient sleep.
Perhaps it would help you to understand the psychoneurotic if we explained just how these breakdowns occur. Try to bear in mind that all of us have a breaking point, which varies from person to person. This breaking point is a “frustration climax” and is reached whenever the person has so many frustrations piled on him that he can no longer endure them. The ability to take it is frustration tolerance. Any one of us can break if the frustrations are intense enough and long continued. So when the soldier breaks, it simply means that his frustrations have been more than he can bear. It is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to be hidden. In a war the soldier is constantly exposed to the threat of death, and never seeing his loved ones again. But in civilian life, death does not constantly threaten him and normally he is not so beset by frustrations.
Immediately after the 1918 Armistice was signed, thousands of soldiers who seemed to be neurotic, shellshocked, etc., recovered very quickly. Why? Because their lives were no longer threatened, they could return home and were relieved from the noise of battle and the emotional upheavals of seeing comrades shot down.
What does all this tell you? Simply this. When such a veteran comes home he may seem strange and nervous. He may be cynical about girls and disgusted with things in general. He may even break out in tears occasionally and will gripe a great deal. But he usually will return to normal soon. It may take a month, three months, even six months. If you are his girl just be patient. Don’t make him talk, don’t ask him for harrowing details of battle. Encourage him to get plenty to eat, sleep and rest. Don’t drag him around and show him off. Give him lots of love and affection. Keep him busy and occupied when he is in the mood. In short, be natural with him, but don’t pamper him too much or too long.
As for marriage, there is no reason why he shouldn’t marry. He will usually make a perfectly normal husband if he isn’t exposed to new, continued frustrations. If he is still unsettled certainly don’t marry yet because marriage, and the responsibilities marriage involves, will certainly not help him. The best procedure would be to wait at least six months and then marry—unless his doctor or psychologist advises against it.