Marriage and the Family

Abstract

T HE problem of marriage has reached the panacea stage. At last we have the perfect cure-all for every kind of matrimonial incompatibility-sex technique. The confidence with which this simple remedy is pressed, regardless of the nature and history of the marriage difficulty, betrays the eagerness with which people shy from the complexity of the problem of modern marriage. It reveals how little the working of cause and effect is understood in this part of human experience. Like the old-time medico who made up for his small understanding of a disease by the cocksureness with which he prescribed a medicine certain to cure it, those who have at last awakened to the seriousness of the modern problem of marriage failures grasp with avidity the idea that efficient sex technique solves any marriage maladjustment. The American public has been loath to admit that there is a marriage problem. Of course no one could deny that many who married were unhappy, even unable to live together. The divorce rate made this as clear as the clinical thermometer made fever. There was, however, one stock answer. It was not marriage but the men and women who married that failed. True, indeed, but it is equally true that the success or failure of marriage as an institution is measurable only through the matrimonial experiences of husbands and wives. This fact is beginning to penetrate the complacency of those fortunately married. The constant increase in divorce, apparent wherever legislation and public opinion permit a free expression of marital discontent, is too stubborn a fact to be lightly dismissed as merely evidence of the selfishness of individual men and women. Marriage cannot survive as an achievement of a social aristocracy. It grew out of human need. If it is to continue as a conventional social experience acceptable to the multitude, a recognized norm in human behavior, it must satisfactorily meet these same needs under modern conditions. This truth has been slowly worming itself into the social snugness long content with the notion recently given this characteristic expression by one of our law-makers, "If we can't make people realize marriage is sacred we can at least show them that it is permanent." This idea that marriage can be bolstered up by repressive divorce legislation has passed in America and will rarely be heard henceforth even in political oratory and pulpit sermonizing. We have a problem and at last we are ready to admit it. The first proof of our change of mind