Techniques of Marital Adjustment

Abstract

Among more sophisticated and scientific students of the family there is at times a tendency to ignore the complexity of family relations, the circularity and roundaboutness in the so-called causal relationships obtaining among social phenomena, and the necessity of understanding in order to control. The lack of any absolute norms or standards to guide the adjustment of marital relations is not always realized. An interesting example of lack of insight and perspective on the part of certain persons is the constant preoccupation with the problem of divorce. Divorce is obviously the last step in the process of alienation which is made more or less inevitable by the fact that a particular couple marries. If copper wires meet to sputter and smolder until they burn themselves apart, we do not bewail the separation but rather the sparks. We do not hold the wires together so they may learn to get along more quietly. Even if it were the breaking of a sacred connection to which we objected, our concern would be in keeping certain wires apart in the first place. It is the writer's thesis that we have