First, you might ask, what are your chances of getting a mate of any kind? If you are a man, and are interested, you can be almost one hundred per cent certain you will marry. More than ten per cent of the eligible men today won’t marry, but that will largely be due to the fact that they prefer to remain bachelors.
If you are a girl the chances that you will marry are not quite as good. At the start of the war about thirteen per cent of the girls were failing to marry. The prospect now is that for several years after the war about fourteen or fifteen per cent will fail. It will be a good market for men.
Girls in some age brackets will be hit harder than others, and we sympathize with the girls past twenty-five who feel they were passing the peak of the eligibility curve for marriage while many of the best male prospects were still away in the armed forces. These girls have cause for concern. The surplus of grown women over men—which is something new in our population—has been increased by war casualties. And the number of men who prefer bachelorhood is apt to increase from ten per cent at present to perhaps fifteen per cent because the older a single man becomes the less he thinks about marriage. This war has created a great many “old” single men.
It is estimated that between two million and five million of the marriageable women in America today will never marry. Sociologists are already worrying about this “lost generation” of our women between twenty and thirty-five, with those in their late twenties presumably hit the hardest.
You may ask when a girl reaches the peak of her eligibility for marriage. In normal years the peak is between nineteen and twenty-one, and the curve declines markedly after the twenty-fifth birthday. Here are the chances for men and women to marry by certain ages:
CHANCES OF WHITE MALES AND WHITE FEMALES BEING MARRIED BY VARIOUS AGES (1940 CENSUS)
| By Age | Chances of Being Married |
Chances of Being Married |
Chances of Marrying at Some Particular Year of Age |
|||||
| Men | Women | Men | Women | |||||
| 14 | 1 | in 1000 | 3 | in 1000 | 1 | in 1000 | 3 | in 1000 |
| 15 | 2 | ” | 12 | ” | 1 | ” | 9 | ” |
| 16 | 3 | ” | 39 | ” | 1 | ” | 27 | ” |
| 17 | 7 | ” | 90 | ” | 4 | ” | 51 | ” |
| 18 | 21 | ” | 177 | ” | 14 | ” | 87 | ” |
| 19 | 54 | ” | 270 | ” | 33 | ” | 93 | ” |
| 20 | 109 | ” | 372 | ” | 55 | ” | 102 | ” |
| 21 | 190 | ” | 456 | ” | 81 | ” | 84 | ” |
| 22 | 272 | ” | 538 | ” | 82 | ” | 82 | ” |
| 23 | 371 | ” | 613 | ” | 99 | ” | 75 | ” |
| 24 | 457 | ” | 671 | ” | 86 | ” | 58 | ” |
| 25 | 531 | ” | 714 | ” | 74 | ” | 43 | ” |
| 26 | 592 | ” | 749 | ” | 61 | ” | 35 | ” |
| 27 | 650 | ” | 780 | ” | 58 | ” | 31 | ” |
| 28 | 694 | ” | 799 | ” | 44 | ” | 19 | ” |
| 29 | 738 | ” | 823 | ” | 44 | ” | 24 | ” |
| 30 | 748 | ” | 822 | ” | 10 | ” | 1 | ” |
| 31 | 790 | ” | 853 | ” | 42 | ” | 30 | ” |
| 32 | 791 | ” | 853 | ” | 1 | ” | 1 | ” |
| 33 | 814 | ” | 870 | ” | 23 | ” | 17 | ” |
| 34 | 828 | ” | 874 | ” | 14 | ” | 4 | ” |
The odds for men show that only about one in ten marries before he is twenty-one; one in three marry at ages twenty-one to twenty-five; about three to ten marry between twenty-five and thirty, and about one in ten marries between thirty and thirty-five.
A factor unfavorable to the older girls, past twenty-five, is that as men become older they tend to marry increasingly younger girls. Normally, for example, a man of twenty-five will marry a girl of twenty-two, whereas a man of thirty-one will probably marry a girl of twenty-five. That’s why girls in the present twenty-five to thirty-five group may be hardest hit by the war. One encouraging possibility, however, is that veterans are looking for more wisdom and maturity in their brides than civilians of the same age usually do. There have been a good many reports of veterans marrying girls five and ten years their senior.
Idealistically, the best age for a girl to marry is from twenty-one to twenty-seven, and for a man from twenty-five to thirty.
Of all women who do marry, about fifty-six per cent are married by their twenty-fifth birthday, about eighty-four per cent by their thirtieth birthday and about ninety-five per cent by their thirty-fifth birthday. After thirty-five a woman has to get busy if she wants to marry!
Thirty-five is when an unmarried woman can no longer consider herself a “young maid.”
The marriage prospects for girls today would not be quite so unfavorable if our men would all seek mates. As it is, with from ten to fifteen per cent preferring to remain single, at least a million girls will not have an opportunity to marry. As far as we can gather the reason behind this masculine perversity is that boys, unlike girls, are not indoctrinated with the idea that marriage should be one of their big goals in life.
But why, you may ask, are there more eligible girls than men in America? The imbalance caused by the war is not the only reason. Here are some other reasons for the shortage of males that looms:
—Men die younger than women. The “weaker sex” is actually the tougher sex when it comes to reaching a ripe old age.
—Our male surplus of immigrants has been about used up. Immigration is a form of pioneering and has been considered primarily a task of man. When the flow of immigrants was heavy it accounted for many thousands of our male surplus. Now the flow has dwindled to a trickle.
—America is no longer a “young” nation. And of course the older our population becomes, the more feminine it becomes for the reasons mentioned above. There are still more boy babies born in America than girl babies (about 105 boys per hundred girls) but because the males die faster—both by natural causes and by accidents—the males slip into the minority now after the age of twenty-five.
War affects marriage in very peculiar ways. During the initial phase of World War II, marriages increased at a spectacular rate. This probably was due to the increasing prosperity (prosperity increases both marriages and divorces!) and by the psychological incentives to mate as a result of war. These include not only the impulses to elude the draft, but the yearning of a boy to keep some visible contact with home and the yearning of the girl to have some concrete commitment from a man when so many of them were leaving the community to go to war.
By 1942, 1,800,000 marriages took place in the country, the highest number in history. Then the rate started dropping off as men became more scarce, so that by 1944 the number of marriages was only 1,440,000. In 1945 the trend was changing. Judging from events after World War I, the postwar years will see a spurt in marriages that may take the rate to nearly two million a year for a couple of years. But that won’t change the fact that a good many girls still will not have a chance to marry.
But even if you do marry, what are the chances you will get a mate you like?
The answer depends a great deal on who you are. We can assure you that such mates will not come automatically. Right now there are at least a million married couples who are waiting to get a divorce. Millions of other couples tolerate each other but are not happy by any standards we could apply to them.
Many of the unsuccessful matches were “war marriages” hastily made. A study made after the first war, of marriages hastily contracted from 1916 to 1920 show that those marriages were less happy for both men and women than those contracted before the war. Another study showed that the marriages undertaken immediately after men came back from World War I were not—on an average—as happy as they would have been normally. The same will be true for many of the hurriedly contracted marriages in 1946 and 1947.
These studies substantiate the fact that much greater likelihood of mismating exists when marriages are hastily contracted, and especially when contracted at a time of high emotional excitement.
As this book is written one marriage in five is ending in divorce—and as we get further into the postwar years the rate will probably rise to at least one failure in every four marriages. Furthermore, if the long-range trends continue the divorce rate will be one divorce for every two marriages by 1975! Hollywood stars, and physicians in some states, are already close to that rate. That’s pretty depressing to contemplate when you consider that fifteen years ago the rate was one failure in fourteen marriages.
Perhaps the one encouraging aspect of the growing male shortage is that it may slow down the divorce rate. Divorces occur most frequently when men are plentiful. When men are scarce women tend to hang on to what they have and need to be provoked before they will fly off to Reno.
Why is the divorce rate rising at such an ominous rate? Admittedly there are deeper reasons than the war for the trend. Civilization, in becoming more complex, puts greater strains and stresses on marriage. Unhappy married couples are not held together as much as they used to be by fears inspired by hell-and-damnation religion. Our movies and soap operas present marriage in a fantastically unreal light. Finally, it seems that our standards for marriage happiness are now so low that people assume a couple is happy as long as the husband doesn’t beat his wife openly.
You may be interested to know that all the trends indicate that more divorced men remarry than do divorced women. In spite of the fact that each divorce separates a couple, in 1940 there were twice as many feminine divorcees who had not remarried as there were unmarried male divorces. The records also disclose the interesting fact that only about ten per cent of the women getting divorces ask alimony, and that only six per cent get it.
Your chances of getting a mate you will like are even affected by your sex. If you are a girl your chances are not as good as if you were a man. This is largely due to the fact that a girl cannot gracefully take the initiative in stalking a mate who looks attractive to her. Women enjoy being pursued, but men still don’t! They don’t want anything that seems too easy to win. If the woman takes the initiative—at least if she takes it conspicuously—the world will think her aggressive, and unladylike. She will be thought “common,” for instance, if she goes to the phone and asks a boy for a date or if she proposes marriage. Despite the progress of feminine emancipation during this century, and especially during World War II, this is still a man’s world. And probably feminism will be on the defensive after the war when the veterans return and many of the women will be expected to retire gracefully to the kitchens. At any rate, our present moral standards apparently make it much more difficult for a girl to win some possible mate who interests her than it is for a man.
Few of our younger people realize it but there are also a host of other factors that often limit the number of acceptable mates they are able to choose from.
Marriage counselors use the phrase “assortative mating” to describe the way two people of the opposite sex pair up on the basis of being pretty much like each other and living in much the same neighborhood. The term was first used to describe the way animals mate on the basis of similar size and color.
Today’s men and girls often set up criteria in selecting a mate that narrow their possible choices more than they realize. A man often has some pretty specific ideas on the kind of girl he wants to marry, and the girl has similar ideas about her husband-to-be. The chances of a person getting a mate he will like becomes less and less as he raises his qualifications.
In the early days of American life, when civilization was much simpler than it is today—and when people differed less in their social and economic status—a girl or man usually could find among five acquaintances someone suitable for marriage. The situation is decidedly different today. One authority in this field estimates that a girl, for example, needs to know twenty or twenty-five young men in order that she may have sufficient range to find someone eligible for her needs.
Let’s look at some of the little-considered factors that limit your choice.
How Old Must Your Mate Be? Many people who are looking for a mate think it is bad for the bride to be older than the groom. The girl is especially sensitive about this because she feels she may be losing prestige. Actually such marriages usually turn out to be happier than average because the girl is usually more eager to prove herself a good wife and is less apt to be a clinging vine; but that doesn’t change the fact that some people still frown on such marriages.
Society also frowns on matches where there is a great difference in age. For example marriages where the man is ten years older are viewed with alarm. For reasons not too well understood, marriages in which the husband is from four to seven years older than his bride are less happy than those involving any other age differences. However, if the man is eight or more years older, no special handicap seems to be involved.
Taken as a whole the happiest—and most socially approved—marriages are those in which the man is one to two years older.
How Educated Must Your Mate Be? All the studies that have been made of marriage show that as one’s educational level rises, an individual tends more and more to make a rational—and less emotional—choice of a mate. The educated man has a greater range of choice than the educated woman, because he is much more willing to marry under his educational level whereas a woman—again for reasons of prestige—is usually reluctant to do so. If she goes to college, she feels she has no choice but to restrict her selection to college men. By so confining herself and by leading a more cloistered life than her cousin who never went past high school, a college girl definitely reduces her chances of marrying. Whereas in the past nearly ninety per cent of our women have married, it is estimated that only about seventy-five per cent of college women have married!
How Much Money Must Your Mate Have? If you have money yourself or have it in your family you are more apt to make a hard-headed choice for a mate than one who has little money. He will marry more spontaneously. If you think back you may remember that during the depression of 1929-33 people of high economic status postponed marrying until more stable times whereas the people with small incomes went right on marrying, if they could possibly manage it.
Generally people tend to marry pretty much into their own economic class. The girl who was raised in the poor section of town and is now working as a sales clerk in a five-and-ten store may yearn to marry a sophisticated man from a wealthy family, but that is not the kind of mate she needs. It is doubtful that she could be happy with him because their differences are too great.
There are exceptions, of course. Occasionally we all read about, and cheer, a news report of a modern Cinderella but we usually frown when we read of the opposite: of a rich girl marrying a poor man. That somehow seems abnormal to us. The girl may lose caste. A man of moderate means who himself married a debutante expressed his views on such arrangements however when he said to us: “Never marry for money. But it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich girl!”
How About the Mate’s National Background and Religion? Are you an American of Italian extraction who would not consider marrying a girl of Swedish background? Or are you a Catholic who would not think of marrying anyone but another Catholic? You may have good reasons for your exclusiveness but the fact remains that your field has been narrowed.
How Is Your Job Affecting Your Prospects? People tend to marry mates who live conveniently near and who have similar interests. (About a fifth of all married couples meet each other at work.) A school teacher, for example, is much more likely to know school teachers of the opposite sex than to know physicians of the opposite sex. Yet many occupations are such that far more of one sex enter them than is true of the other. For example, there are normally nearly five women teachers to one man teacher; seven or eight feminine librarians to one male librarian; some twenty-five or thirty women in nursing to each man in somewhat similar work. Is it any wonder that the rate of marriage among school teachers, librarians and among nurses is much lower than average? Girls who choose nursing for a career cut their marriage prospects by at least 50 percent.
Finally, How Is Geography Affecting Your Prospects for Mates? Though the conditions of World War II broadened the matrimonial horizon of many men and girls as they moved about the country the fact remains that location is an important factor in confining the choice of millions of people.
In a study of several thousand marriages in Philadelphia it was discovered that four out of five young people there selected their mates from within their own city. In one out of three of the marriages the couple had lived within five blocks of each other before marriage.
Looking at the country as a whole, some towns and sections offer better marriage prospects than others. This is a little known fact. For example, the cities of New England offer the poorest possibilities for young women to marry of any section of the country. This is mainly because the textile industries in that area attract so many more women than men. Of the thirty United States cities offering the poorest opportunities for marriage for women, twenty-two are in New England. And of the thirty offering the best opportunities for women, about half are in Michigan, Ohio and Northern Indiana, where the automotive industries—which attract far more men than women—are located.
It is interesting to note that during World War II the marriage rate increased very rapidly in areas with new war industries requiring a great number of men—shipbuilding, aircraft, metal working. In Baltimore, the marriage rate went up nearly forty per cent; in Hartford, important in aviation, it went up twenty-five per cent.
Areas that consistently favor girls by providing a surplus of eligible men are the Far West and the Southwest, particularly Texas. The Deep South is much less favorable.
Where does your state stand on the ratio of eligible men to eligible women? The typical American male marries at about twenty-five and a half and the typical female at twenty-two and a half, or about three years earlier. Thus perhaps the fairest comparison would be to take the single men between twenty-three and twenty-eight and the single women between twenty and twenty-five. The following table shows how each state rates in such a comparison. It is based on the 1940 census.
NUMBER OF SINGLE WHITE MALES 23-28 YEARS OLD FOR EACH 100 SINGLE WHITE FEMALES 20-25 YEARS OLD
| Nevada | 177.21 | Indiana | 97.96 |
| Wyoming | 164.66 | Georgia | 97.56 |
| Idaho | 130.61 | Illinois | 95.42 |
| California | 128.01 | Minnesota | 95.41 |
| Arizona | 127.09 | Delaware | 94.29 |
| Montana | 125.49 | Missouri | 94.28 |
| Washington | 121.78 | Mississippi | 94.20 |
| Dist. of Col. | 119.20 | Maine | 93.20 |
| Oregon | 116.82 | Alabama | 93.17 |
| New Mexico | 113.19 | Iowa | 91.83 |
| Florida | 111.39 | New Jersey | 91.12 |
| Texas | 109.17 | Ohio | 90.92 |
| Vermont | 107.50 | New York | 90.46 |
| Virginia | 106.64 | Pennsylvania | 90.17 |
| Maryland | 106.18 | Tennessee | 90.03 |
| North Dakota | 105.76 | Nebraska | 89.56 |
| Colorado | 102.59 | Utah | 89.23 |
| Michigan | 101.68 | New Hampshire | 89.14 |
| Louisiana | 101.61 | Kansas | 88.66 |
| Kentucky | 100.98 | Connecticut | 88.57 |
| Wisconsin | 100.82 | South Carolina | 87.55 |
| Arkansas | 99.24 | North Carolina | 86.35 |
| West Virginia | 99.12 | Massachusetts | 83.25 |
| South Dakota | 98.32 | Rhode Island | 82.61 |
| Oklahoma | 97.99 |
Nevada leads the list as the paradise for girls since there are 177 men there for each 100 girls. At the other end of the scale Rhode Island is over-populated with females (due to its many textile mills) and so is an unpromising place for girls to find a mate but a fine place for men. There are one hundred girls for every eighty-three men.
Notice that all of the first nine states offering the best possibilities for girls are in the West, and that the five most favorable states for men are in the East. Perhaps the old slogan “Go West, young man, go West” might be revised to read “Go East, young man; go West, young woman.”
There is another age range that needs consideration. That is, the groups who have not married by the time most people marry. These groups are the men between thirty and thirty-five and girls between twenty-five and thirty. Both these groups need to get busy because they face a very definite possibility of becoming crusty old bachelors or disgruntled spinsters. Since men past thirty tend to marry women who are more than three years younger than themselves it might be valid to compare the number of girls twenty-five to thirty to the men thirty to thirty-five. Here again the West is the great land of opportunity for girls while the Carolinas and the New England textile states are still less inviting to girls. One interesting thing is that in the Southern states of Kentucky, Virginia and Louisiana a girl’s ratio is pretty favorable up to twenty-five years but after that they become definitely not good places to find a husband.
If we take all single men as a whole and compare them to the single women, without regard to age, here is how the states seem to shape up:
| The Ten Best for Women and Poorest for Men |
The Ten Poorest for Women and Best for Men |
|
| Wyoming | Massachusetts | |
| Montana | Rhode Island | |
| Idaho | Connecticut | |
| Washington | New Hampshire | |
| Arizona | New Jersey | |
| California | New York | |
| North Dakota | Pennsylvania | |
| Oregon | Ohio | |
| South Dakota | North Carolina | |
| Nevada | Missouri |
Of the ten best states for women all are west of the Mississippi, and of the best states for men all but one is east of the Mississippi.
While the states themselves are pretty good guides as to where to go to pick a mate, the location within a particular state may be of even greater importance. For example, in Virginia, Norfolk rates as a fine place for a girl to find a husband but Richmond rates way down the scale. Here is a comparison of the number of white, single girls in the twenty-five to thirty age group and of the white, single men aged thirty to thirty-five in our 106 cities having a population of fifty thousand or more. (In such a comparison, incidentally, virtually all of our cities show a surplus of older girls over older men when those two age groups are compared. Here, however, we are interested only in the relative desirability of cities.)
| The Twenty Best Cities for Women and Poorest for Men (in order) |
The Twenty Poorest Cities for Women and Best for Men (in order) |
|
| San Diego, Cal. | Madison, Wis. | |
| San Francisco, Cal. | Lincoln, Neb. | |
| Norfolk, Va. | Des Moines, Ia. | |
| Miami, Fla. | Jackson, Miss. | |
| Long Beach, Cal. | Evanston, Ill. | |
| Los Angeles, Cal. | Minneapolis, Minn. | |
| Phoenix, Ariz. | Wichita, Kans. | |
| Oakland, Cal. | St. Paul, Minn. | |
| Tacoma, Wash. | Nashville, Tenn. | |
| Sacramento, Cal. | Winston-Salem, N. C. | |
| San Antonio, Tex. | Knoxville, Tenn. | |
| Houston, Tex. | Grand Rapids, Mich. | |
| Detroit, Mich. | Fort Wayne, Ind. | |
| Baltimore, Md. | Salt Lake City, Utah | |
| Pueblo, Colo. | New Haven, Conn. | |
| Peoria, Ill. | Omaha, Nebr. | |
| Mobile, Ala. | Cleveland, Ohio | |
| Trenton, N. J. | Springfield, Ill. | |
| Jacksonville, Fla. | Montgomery, Ala. | |
| Columbus, Ga. | Hartford, Conn. |
Girls on farms and in small towns may fret to get to the big cities but their chances of marrying will be better in their rural communities, where there are 104 men for every hundred women, than in the cities where the ratio is ninety-six men per hundred girls.
Women’s colleges and all-male colleges may have their advantages educationally but they can deprive you of the chance for normal contacts with the opposite sex, and thus reduce your chances of marrying.
To get a fairly accurate idea of just what your marriage expectancy is, considering all factors, you should take the test reproduced with this chapter on “What Is Your Marriage Expectancy?”
If your expectancy rating is low do not become pessimistic. That’s the worst thing that could happen. Rather decide what you want in a mate ... find where such a mate exists ... establish friendships that will lead to introductions ... make yourself attractive to possible mates by studying their wants and needs and appearing to fill them. This is a formula that will get almost anyone a mate if he or she really wants one.
This test should show pretty clearly whether your chances of marrying are good, or not so good. Be honest with yourself.
The correct answer to the first three questions is no, and to all the remaining thirty-one questions yes. If you answered twenty-five or more of the questions correctly then you have a high “expectancy” rating. If you answered only eight or less of them correctly then your chances of marrying are definitely poor unless you take action to improve your eligibility.