While all this association with the opposite sex is going on, the girl or young man is learning what kind of a mate he wants in marriage. It is only through these experiences (starting with puppy love) that they begin to set standards and qualifications of the persons they would like to marry. The typical boy or girl needs to date a good many persons before they know the kind they would like to have as a mate, to decide upon the minimum standards they wish.
In going with one girl the boy learns to appreciate music and decides he wants a wife who can play the piano. In going with another girl he finds he wants a girl who is brunette, who is reasonably tall, who is relatively slim. In going with a third girl he discovers he wants a person who has as much education as he does and who is interested at least politely with mechanical things, which happen to be his passion. In going with still another girl he discovers that it is important to him for her to have control of her temper, to be friendly to people, to be gracious in manner, to be kind and considerate. And so it goes. It is only through such experiences that a man gradually learns what he wants in a wife and what is important to him.
In contrast, it is ignorance of what one wants that may prevent you from ever achieving a happy marriage. Not knowing what you want or need, you may marry the first person with whom you become infatuated.
Today there are nearly twenty-five thousand different occupations in the country. More people are completing high school—and college—than ever before in history. The radio and automobile have broadened man’s horizon. Thus for the man today a selection of a wife from among a half-dozen girls whom he has known would be a hazardous selection. As we have said before, he would need to know at least twenty-five eligible single girls—and date at least a dozen of them—before he could be fairly sure of finding one that would meet his wants and needs.
Chapter VI
Sex Adventuring
In the course of looking over the field for mates a large part of our young people become involved in bodily petting and complete intimacy. How widespread are such premarital sex relations? All the factual studies would indicate that there has been a steady increase. Dr. L. M. Terman, whose book Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness, published in 1938, reports a study he made of 792 couples, concludes:
“The trend toward premarital sex experience is proceeding with extraordinary rapidity.”
Of older couples who married around 1910, he found fifty per cent of the men and eighty-seven per cent of the women had been virgins at the time of marriage. In contrast, of those who married about ten years ago only fourteen per cent of the men and thirty-two per cent of the women were virgins at marriage. Dr. Terman predicted:
“If the drop should continue at the average rate shown ... virginity at marriage will be close to the vanishing point” for males marrying after 1955 and for girls marrying after 1960.