ARE YOU GROWN UP EMOTIONALLY?
More than almost anything else, your rating on “emotional maturity” reveals your chances of achieving a happy marriage. Here is a more detailed test of your rating on this crucial trait. Answer yes only if you are sure.
If you honestly answered yes to fourteen of these or more you are more mature emotionally than the average person. If you answered yes to sixteen or more you should have an exceptionally good chance for a happy marriage.
Chapter IV
Is It Love—or Infatuation?
“Love” is unquestionably the most abused word in the English language. People “love” puppies, or they “love” ice cream. Women commonly close their letters to acquaintances with the word “love” as do all relatives when they write to one another. Boys trying to get a kiss from their girl friends mumble something about love. That’s to make the giving easier for the girl.
Then there are different kinds of genuine love. A mother loves her two-year-old baby just as wholeheartedly as she loves her husband. And she loves her husband now just as much as she did as a girl eight years ago when she “fell” in love with him, but the love is different. She was more misty-eyed then. She didn’t realize it but the earlier love was heavily flavored by sexual attraction. Now sex is still present in her regard for her husband but the bond is primarily a deep feeling of comradeship. And with the baby, of course, true sexual feelings are not involved at all.
In all three of the cases, however, she had developed a deep concern for the welfare of the loved one; and in all three of the cases the loved one had similar feelings of attachment to her. Right here you have the gist of true love, whether parental, conjugal or romantic.
Still, it is often difficult to know if your “love” is the real thing. Two out of five of the girls who come to the Penn State Marriage Counseling Service for advice about their affairs think they are in love but aren’t sure.
One girl was really confused. She reported that she was terribly in love with two different men at the college. One was on the basketball team. The other played in a campus orchestra. She did not know which one she loved the more and wanted to be told which to choose. Tests soon established beyond a doubt that she had the warmest kind of physical feeling for both men. But the tests also showed that she was primarily fascinated by them as “catches.” She wasn’t actually in love with either, and was so informed.
She was the victim of double infatuation. How can you tell love from infatuation? Dr. Henry Bowman of Stephens College offers these points of distinction:—
Infatuation may come suddenly but loves takes time.
Infatuation can be based on one or two traits (usually including sex appeal) whereas love is based on many traits.
In infatuation the person is in “love” with love, whereas in love, the person is in love with another person.
In infatuation the other person is thought of as a separate entity and employed for self-gratification. In real love there is a feeling of identity with the other person.
Infatuation produces feelings of insecurity and wishful thinking whereas love produces a sense of security.
In infatuation you suffer loss of ambition, appetite, etc., whereas in love you work and plan to please the other person.
The physical element is much more important in infatuation than in love.
Infatuation may change quickly but love lasts.
In general you can be surer that it is really love if it has developed over a period of time rather than if it comes all of a sudden.
But, you may ask, how about those couples who are “meant for each other” and “fell in love at first sight.” Both are nice romantic notions, but both have little validity in fact.
There is no one person in the world for anyone. We don’t expect happily married couples or happily engaged couples to believe that but all the evidence indicates it is true. There are hundreds, indeed thousands, of people that you could fall in love with and be happily married to. (And there are, of course, thousands and perhaps millions of people you would be miserable with as mates.) The only sense in which there can be a “one and only” for you is that there may be only one good prospect within your range of possible acquaintanceship. It is the multitude of good possible mates that sometimes makes it difficult for a girl to choose between two men. It is the multitude of possibilities that produces triangular situations after marriages; and it is this multitude of available mates in America that makes it possible for a girl to find and love a man in her own community rather than to have to go from Maine to California to meet a “one and only.”
As for instantaneous love, a girl has about as much chance of “falling in love at first sight” as she does of becoming Cinderella. At times couples experience “infatuation at first sight” which may or may not later mature into love. And ordinarily the infatuation is based about eighty per cent on sexual attraction. “Love at first sight” also often occurs when you come across someone who happens to match your “phantasy ideal” for a mate. If you have always dreamed of a bride with large brown eyes, a turned-up nose and a shapely figure—and you are ripe for mating—you fall for the first girl matching that description. It is a mighty hazardous way to try to pick a mate.
Other people think they fall in love “at first sight” because they are desperately anxious to have some one to hold to, and clutch at the first person who comes along. They suffer from feelings of insecurity. This was particularly true of girls during the war. One girl who came to the Penn State clinic was rapturous about her coming marriage to an army lieutenant stationed temporarily at the college. Why did she love him? She was pretty vague about that and seemed to resent the question. What did they have in common in the way of interests and ideals? The only thing she could think of was that they both liked to bowl. It soon developed that what she was in love with was the idea of getting married. She was twenty-seven and nervous about her future. That she was sincerely convinced she was in love with the man was a tribute to her own powers of self-deception. She realized that she should in all decency be in love with the man she was going to marry, and convinced herself that she was.
Frequently two people fall so madly in “love” soon after meeting that they feel they must marry immediately. This tendency is so well known that most marriage counselors rightfully question if a state of true love exists when the two people feel they will die if they don’t get married tomorrow or next week. Real love can wait. It can make sacrifices; it is not something that has to be rushed. The more urgent the desire to get married immediately, the greater the likelihood that it is infatuation and that the infatuation may die out as abruptly as it sprang into being.
But why, you may ask, is love at first sight so improbable? Why can’t you fall in love as easily immediately as you can after weeks of knowing each other?
Here we get to the essence of love, which Webster’s dictionary defines as: “Desire for, and earnest effort to promote the welfare of, another.” Love is not a trap you fall into. It is a state of respect for and comradeship with another that has developed from the fact that you both have similar tastes, ideals and yearnings. Such comradeship cannot come as a result of one date.
Cynics have said that “love is of all feelings the most egoistic and consequently is, when crossed, the least generous.” That assumes love is possessive and selfish. Genuine love as we understand it today is the medium through which the fullest development of the personalities of a man and woman may take place. And it involves a keen desire for the welfare of the loved person. There is nothing egoistic about real love!
Here briefly are some conditions that are usually present before love can develop:
—The two persons have had experiences together that have caused each to react favorably to the other.
—They have each found present in the other qualities, standards and ideals which they admire.
—Their sexual feelings have been so favorably conditioned, without their realizing it, that they find great pleasure just in being in each other’s presence.
—Each one in some way fulfills some of the motives that are of importance to the other, such as desire for social approval or, with a man, mastery.
There are many people for whom it is utterly impossible to fall in love. For a few this is due to physical inadequacy. But to most it is a result of unfavorable conditioning that has made them selfish or afraid of contact with the opposite sex. How does a person get the ability to fall in love? From a physical standpoint certain hormones pour into the blood stream of a man or woman past puberty that create sexual tension. But that only starts to explain the complexity of the love relationship.
Your ability to fall in love depends for the most part on your own previous experience as far back as childhood. In the beginning, for example, your mother met all your needs. Every time you cried your mother rushed to you, to feed you, to give you a drink, to change your diaper or to remove a pin that was sticking in you. Gradually in your mind the mother becomes associated with everything pleasant, with eating, the relief of thirst, the elimination of pain. You probably became attached to her with a depth of love and affection that lasted for many years. Similarly your mother received pleasure from hearing your coos when she gave you relief from pain, she received the approval of your father for bearing you and the admiring comments on you from the neighbors; and she satisfied her motive of mastery by having something (you) under her control. Her love deepened for you.
It has been observed in the South, where the nursemaids may often spend more time with the child than the mother does that the child becomes more favorably conditioned to the nursemaid than to the mother. That illustrates that love is a learned process.
As you grew older and began playing with children you learned to like those with whom playing was fun and you learned to dislike those where your association was marked only by dissatisfaction and unpleasantness.
Similarly if your early associations with those of the opposite sex were all marked by unpleasantness and nervous tension you tended to stick to those of your own sex; but if they were marked with pleasure you turned more and more to the other sex.
Even the appearance of the girl that a young man likes is due to pleasant associations with other persons who had one or more of the characteristics that his girl has. It is not just accident that girls are more likely to fall in love with boys who have characteristics resembling their own fathers than they are with boys who don’t. Similarly a boy is more likely to fall in love with a girl who resembles his own mother than with a girl who doesn’t.
If your early life has been marked by strife in the home and tension in your relation with people your own age, then you have been poorly conditioned for the comradeship married love can provide. And you probably will have the greatest difficulty finding happiness in marriage.
But if your relationships with people have been relatively serene, you will find it easy to learn to love someone of the opposite sex. You will find that when you do certain things you receive approval by way of happy smiles and rewards. Gradually you learn to put your best foot forward. You and your date both are conditioned to be on your best behavior and if you have many things in common develop a deep friendship with each other.
Then, if the conditioning during the friendship is quite favorable, your mutual feeling of appreciation and affection for each other grows and finally ripens into love. There you have it.
In your love for each other you will both gradually become sexually vibrant and you both will begin to feel a need for sexual expression through each other. As this need becomes increasingly strong, you both begin to think of engagement and marriage. Ideally when your need for each other becomes so strong that it can no longer be denied, you are married.