How to Pick a Mate: The Guide to a Happy Marriage

by Clifford R. Adams; Vance Packard

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.