Mating is as old as Eve. In fact it is the oldest and most popular custom ever devised by mankind. Even in the most isolated tribes that explorers have uncovered on this globe adult males pair up with females to live together as man and wife.
In many areas of the world, it is true, marriages are still arranged by the elders, often at a neat financial profit to the bride’s parents. Freedom of choice in mating is a newfangled idea. And in Madagascar the groom is warned at the wedding that he can beat the bride all he pleases, but if he breaks any bones or gouges any eyes she has a perfect right to go home to mother. Yet even there mating is popular.
Though marriage is the most universal institution known to man increasing numbers of Americans are shunning it by divorce or otherwise. About ten per cent of our marriageable men have become unbudgeable bachelors. The number of women who are choosing careers to marriage is soaring. Moreover there are 1,500,000 men and women in America who tried marriage and are now living apart in divorce. Many others were divorced, then remarried.
Thus “Why marry, anyhow?” is today a fair question. So let’s face right at the start the main reasons why people do not marry, or stay married.
Many people do not marry because they don’t relish the idea of giving up their freedom, their independence. Some men do not like the idea of being “saddled” with family responsibilities and being “tied down” to one woman. Likewise, some women have become so accustomed to living alone—and are so reluctant to give up careers—that they hesitate to give up their independence, until it is too late.
Many other girls and men do not marry because they are too particular. Often they have a “phantasy ideal” of the mate they want and can’t find such an interested party in real life. Girls for example often sigh that they want a man “tall, dark and handsome—and graying at the temples.” Without realizing it at least a quarter of all girls yearn for a man who looks like their own father. And a quarter of the men pick someone who looks vaguely like their own mother.
There are still other people who don’t marry because they lack a decent opportunity. Girls who choose nursing as a career, for example, cut their marriage prospects at least fifty per cent. It is much the same for librarians and social workers. In fact a girl can reduce her chances of marriage merely by going to a girls’ college.
Then there is a large group who do not marry because they have been disappointed in love—perhaps an early love affair ended in disappointment or grief. It produced a psychological scar that prevented the person from achieving happiness through marriage with anyone else. The death of Ann Rutledge shook Abraham Lincoln so profoundly that though he finally married years later, for appearances’ sake, he was a miserable husband. A boy who imagines himself passionately in love and then is jilted by a girl who doesn’t even let him down gently may lose faith and crawl into a psychological shell in his relations with other women.
One college girl became enamored, during her sophomore year, of a prominent man-about-campus. She came from a fine Philadelphia family and was an attractive, sincere girl. But she was very naïve. This man began rushing her. He took her to parties at his fraternity, took her for several moonlight rides in his roadster, and told her she was the girl he had always dreamed of. Within three weeks she had lost her virginity. In a few more weeks he had lost interest and was off to make new conquests, and she came to the sickening realization that he had merely been exploiting her love for physical pleasure. Disillusioned, she had to change colleges to keep from facing her friends. She did not tell this story to the counselors at the Penn State Marriage Counseling Service (“Compatibility Clinic”) until two years later. During those two years she had been so crushed and full of bitterness that she had not let another man touch or even kiss her.
Occasionally men and women do not marry because they have family responsibilities—perhaps a widowed mother or younger orphaned brothers and sisters—which make them feel they can’t afford, or have no right, to take on a mate.
Still others have physical handicaps. There are some handicaps, of course, that are severe enough to be a real handicap, like the loss of both arms, but more often the handicaps are not serious in themselves. They are serious because the possessor magnifies them in his mind and begins feeling inadequate and inferior. The same applies to a person who thinks he is ugly. Irregular facial features in themselves are never a serious handicap if their possessor has self-confidence and a pleasant personality.
The main reason why people do not marry, however, is that they have an unhealthy attitude which makes it virtually impossible for them to adjust themselves happily to thoughts of marriage. They are full of fears about the obligations that marriage may bring.
Some are too selfish or too egocentric to be able to compromise; and in marriage as in any partnership the partners must be able to sacrifice their private desires for the common cause. Marriage is no place for prima donnas.
Other poorly adjusted persons are incapable of accepting the many responsibilities that go with marriage. Perhaps their mother or father tied them down so closely as a child that they never had a chance to develop their own feeling of self-sufficiency and independence. There are parents who cannot turn their children loose. They object to dating until the youngsters have become so old that learning to get along with the other sex is difficult.
Such children have a fixation for the parents and cannot see another person entering the picture as a possible substitute or replacement. This is called the Oedipus complex and it is no bogey dreamed up by psychologists. A boy may not marry because he is still jealously in “love” with his own mother. A girl may not marry because she is in “love” with her father. This kind of fixation is made more acute when the parent is selfish or lonely and builds a network around the child which makes escape impossible.
There are some people who are suspicious or jealous by nature. Their emotional instability usually frightens away prospective mates.
Many other people, particularly girls, have an unhealthy attitude toward marriage because they are frightened by the physical intimacies that go with marriage. A 29-year-old wife who had been married four years confessed recently that she dreaded the thought of physical intimacy with her husband. She had moved to another room and was in a rebellious mood. This wife unconsciously revealed a clue to her coldness when she related remarks her mother had made to her during girlhood. The mother had talked of her own agonies during the girl’s birth and had told how the process had injured her internally. The mother had talked of physical intimacy as one of the burdens a wife has to bear. One night, when the girl had been thus conditioned, a date stopped his car on a side road and tried to caress her. She was terrified. Now, twelve years later and formally married, she was still on guard.
The war gave many young people an unhealthy attitude toward marriage. A desire for a “last fling” impelled many of them to promiscuous behavior that has left them with psychological scars. Some men saw so many “loose” women near their stations and embarkation ports (and frequently had affairs themselves with such women) that their attitude toward all women was cheapened. Other young people—both male and female—were separated so long from contact with the opposite sex that they developed—or feared they had developed—unnatural feelings toward members of the same sex; or thought they lost the knack of making themselves seem attractive to girls or men, whichever the opposite may be.
A good many veterans saw so much of war and its destruction that they became cynical of human life and pessimistic about the future. This put them in an extremely poor mood to think of mating.
Yet to millions of other veterans war made marriage seem terribly attractive. After leading a shifting existence where nothing seemed real or permanent, the lasting, unchanging things in life appeared more significant than ever before. Marriage, ideally, is one of the most permanent things in life. It gives a person a chance to sink roots.
This brings us to the other side of the picture: why people do marry. There are thirty million married couples in America today, and they didn’t get married just because it is the customary thing to do.
Marriage must have something to offer. If you doubt it consider these facts:
—Married people normally live longer than single people. According to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company report of 1937, twice as many single men from thirty to forty-five die as married men in the same age bracket. For women between thirty and sixty-five the married women have a ten per cent advantage over the single women. Twice as many widowers die as do men who remain married.
—Fewer married people go to jail than single people.
—Fewer go crazy.
—Fewer commit suicide.
These facts would certainly indicate that married people are happier, better adjusted persons than unmarried persons, despite all the tales about henpecked husbands and browbeaten wives.
Then there are some very practical, hard-boiled reasons why it pays to marry.
For one thing it is cheaper for two people to live together than to live separately. It costs only two-thirds as much.
By marrying, a man becomes a better employment risk. Married men usually are regarded as more steady, more trustworthy employees than single men. This is logical. Marriage exerts a stabilizing influence on most men. An employer can assume that since a married man has taken on the responsibilities of a family he is a better risk than a man who has shown no ability to assume responsibilities. Another point is that the married man is less apt to leave a good job than a single man.
Furthermore a married person is regarded more favorably socially than a bachelor or spinster. This is not just a “ganging up” of spouses against anyone not similarly coupled, though that may be a factor. It’s a fact that there is a greater feeling of belongingness to the community for the married person than for the bachelor or spinster. A married man is better able to entertain acquaintances in his own home. And right or wrong most people feel there is something a bit unnatural about an adult remaining unmarried. Psychiatrists agree that except in exceptional cases women who live alone will become neurotic and frustrated. Living alone is an abnormal state for a woman. (She overcomes this hazard only by accepting her fate realistically and setting out intelligently to find enrichment and satisfaction in life.)
Married people are less lonely than single people because they have someone with whom to share life’s dull as well as exciting moments and to share their problems and hopes and ambitions.
Also married couples who raise families frequently have an insurance against old age—the knowledge that in their growing children there will be someone to take care of them if necessary.
Life is also more comfortable if you are married than if single, at least for a man. It provides him with home cooking in his own home and someone to keep his socks in order.
A basic argument for marriage is that it offers a logical division of labor. Imagine how much more complicated and inconvenient life would be if men had to do their own cooking and sewing, and women—all women—had to compete with men for a livelihood!
Finally marriage offers a legalized way to achieve sexual satisfaction. Men and women can receive relief from their bodily tensions without the terrible feelings of guilt, anxiety and remorse that often accompany unmarried love. That’s something. Modern psychology recognizes that sexual satisfaction is more than a physiological process of reproducing one’s kind. It is a psychologically satisfying activity and releases many nervous tensions as well as tensions brought about by hormonal or glandular needs.
Those then are the obvious, practical reasons why marriage is so universally popular. But beyond those are some important but less understood cravings which marriage satisfies.
—Beyond the desire for sex satisfaction, for example, is the yearning of both men and women to share the love and affection of somebody of the opposite sex, someone who takes a genuine interest in them. This sometimes is called a need for sexually colored companionship. This is why married people don’t feel the need to run around to shows and parties the way single people do. They have their own companionship within the family. Mark Twain, in his amusing “Extracts from Adam’s Diary” showed the bond created by such companionship when he quoted Adam as reminiscing:
“At first I thought Eve talked too much but ... after all these years I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning. It is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.... Wheresoever she is, there is Eden.”
—A desire for mastery on the part of most men and a desire to be led on the part of most women is another psychological motive that is satisfied by marriage. It is the thrill of mastery that causes a youth to careen dangerously down the highway at eighty miles an hour or to ride a horse at a break-neck gallop.
—There is a desire for pride that is satisfied by saying “my husband,” or “my wife,” or “my oldest kid.”
—There is a desire for security, a need both real and psychological, that afflicts all of us. We all like to know that there is someone who will look after us when we are sick, someone to comfort us when we are grieved, someone to help us when we are weary. Women particularly feel this need for security. In fact some observers who work a great deal in testing the reactions of women to the problems of life say that in women this yearning for security overshadows everything else. Women feel the need for security so much more keenly because, if nothing else, they are the “weaker” sex. They are more dependent on men for their livelihood.
Our returning veterans feel an intense need for another kind of security which marriage can give. After years of uncertainty, shifting, and tearing down of life and property they desperately want to get a hold on something permanent, and to many of them marriage looks like the very best way to do it.
—For much the same reasons veterans want to raise families. After so much destruction they want to build, they want to create life, life bearing their own likeness, life that will continue after they are gone. Watching and guiding one’s own children while they grow up is one of the greatest pleasures of marriage. A couple who deliberately abstains from having children is a selfish couple. Surveys show they mostly do it out of selfishness, the desire of the wife for a career or “dislike for children.” These reasons are those we would expect from maladjusted people. Certainly by voluntarily remaining childless they miss one of the greatest chances to achieve a happy marriage.
By achieving a happy marriage and having children many people make up for the frustrations and disappointments they have received from life, their dissatisfaction with their job and their own childhood. Children bring them compensation for their own failures.
—Finally, marriage enables two people to work together in setting up common goals and—by dreaming, planning, struggling—to achieve those goals. Perhaps the goal is to build a home or take a vacation trip to South America together or to put a son through college. The specific goals are not important. The enrichment comes from the two people’s merging their hopes and efforts toward one mutually-desired goal.
Getting married is one of the biggest steps a person takes in life. In fact, for most people life boils down to coping with three big problems:
—Learning to get along with people.
—Choosing a career and succeeding in it.
—Picking a mate and living happily thereafter.
The three are interdependent. Marriage counselors have noticed the significant fact that the individual who makes friends readily, who likes his work and is successful in it, is also the person who tends to choose an excellent mate for himself and work out with that mate a happy marriage.