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

by Clifford R. Adams; Vance Packard

Many people do not marry because they don’t relish the idea of giving up their freedom, their independence. Some men do not like the idea of being “saddled” with family responsibilities and being “tied down” to one woman. Likewise, some women have become so accustomed to living alone—and are so reluctant to give up careers—that they hesitate to give up their independence, until it is too late.

Many other girls and men do not marry because they are too particular. Often they have a “phantasy ideal” of the mate they want and can’t find such an interested party in real life. Girls for example often sigh that they want a man “tall, dark and handsome—and graying at the temples.” Without realizing it at least a quarter of all girls yearn for a man who looks like their own father. And a quarter of the men pick someone who looks vaguely like their own mother.

There are still other people who don’t marry because they lack a decent opportunity. Girls who choose nursing as a career, for example, cut their marriage prospects at least fifty per cent. It is much the same for librarians and social workers. In fact a girl can reduce her chances of marriage merely by going to a girls’ college.

Then there is a large group who do not marry because they have been disappointed in love—perhaps an early love affair ended in disappointment or grief. It produced a psychological scar that prevented the person from achieving happiness through marriage with anyone else. The death of Ann Rutledge shook Abraham Lincoln so profoundly that though he finally married years later, for appearances’ sake, he was a miserable husband. A boy who imagines himself passionately in love and then is jilted by a girl who doesn’t even let him down gently may lose faith and crawl into a psychological shell in his relations with other women.

One college girl became enamored, during her sophomore year, of a prominent man-about-campus. She came from a fine Philadelphia family and was an attractive, sincere girl. But she was very naïve. This man began rushing her. He took her to parties at his fraternity, took her for several moonlight rides in his roadster, and told her she was the girl he had always dreamed of. Within three weeks she had lost her virginity. In a few more weeks he had lost interest and was off to make new conquests, and she came to the sickening realization that he had merely been exploiting her love for physical pleasure. Disillusioned, she had to change colleges to keep from facing her friends. She did not tell this story to the counselors at the Penn State Marriage Counseling Service (“Compatibility Clinic”) until two years later. During those two years she had been so crushed and full of bitterness that she had not let another man touch or even kiss her.

Occasionally men and women do not marry because they have family responsibilities—perhaps a widowed mother or younger orphaned brothers and sisters—which make them feel they can’t afford, or have no right, to take on a mate.

Still others have physical handicaps. There are some handicaps, of course, that are severe enough to be a real handicap, like the loss of both arms, but more often the handicaps are not serious in themselves. They are serious because the possessor magnifies them in his mind and begins feeling inadequate and inferior. The same applies to a person who thinks he is ugly. Irregular facial features in themselves are never a serious handicap if their possessor has self-confidence and a pleasant personality.

The main reason why people do not marry, however, is that they have an unhealthy attitude which makes it virtually impossible for them to adjust themselves happily to thoughts of marriage. They are full of fears about the obligations that marriage may bring.

Some are too selfish or too egocentric to be able to compromise; and in marriage as in any partnership the partners must be able to sacrifice their private desires for the common cause. Marriage is no place for prima donnas.

Other poorly adjusted persons are incapable of accepting the many responsibilities that go with marriage. Perhaps their mother or father tied them down so closely as a child that they never had a chance to develop their own feeling of self-sufficiency and independence. There are parents who cannot turn their children loose. They object to dating until the youngsters have become so old that learning to get along with the other sex is difficult.