Such children have a fixation for the parents and cannot see another person entering the picture as a possible substitute or replacement. This is called the Oedipus complex and it is no bogey dreamed up by psychologists. A boy may not marry because he is still jealously in “love” with his own mother. A girl may not marry because she is in “love” with her father. This kind of fixation is made more acute when the parent is selfish or lonely and builds a network around the child which makes escape impossible.
There are some people who are suspicious or jealous by nature. Their emotional instability usually frightens away prospective mates.
Many other people, particularly girls, have an unhealthy attitude toward marriage because they are frightened by the physical intimacies that go with marriage. A 29-year-old wife who had been married four years confessed recently that she dreaded the thought of physical intimacy with her husband. She had moved to another room and was in a rebellious mood. This wife unconsciously revealed a clue to her coldness when she related remarks her mother had made to her during girlhood. The mother had talked of her own agonies during the girl’s birth and had told how the process had injured her internally. The mother had talked of physical intimacy as one of the burdens a wife has to bear. One night, when the girl had been thus conditioned, a date stopped his car on a side road and tried to caress her. She was terrified. Now, twelve years later and formally married, she was still on guard.
The war gave many young people an unhealthy attitude toward marriage. A desire for a “last fling” impelled many of them to promiscuous behavior that has left them with psychological scars. Some men saw so many “loose” women near their stations and embarkation ports (and frequently had affairs themselves with such women) that their attitude toward all women was cheapened. Other young people—both male and female—were separated so long from contact with the opposite sex that they developed—or feared they had developed—unnatural feelings toward members of the same sex; or thought they lost the knack of making themselves seem attractive to girls or men, whichever the opposite may be.
A good many veterans saw so much of war and its destruction that they became cynical of human life and pessimistic about the future. This put them in an extremely poor mood to think of mating.
Yet to millions of other veterans war made marriage seem terribly attractive. After leading a shifting existence where nothing seemed real or permanent, the lasting, unchanging things in life appeared more significant than ever before. Marriage, ideally, is one of the most permanent things in life. It gives a person a chance to sink roots.
This brings us to the other side of the picture: why people do marry. There are thirty million married couples in America today, and they didn’t get married just because it is the customary thing to do.
Marriage must have something to offer. If you doubt it consider these facts:
—Married people normally live longer than single people. According to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company report of 1937, twice as many single men from thirty to forty-five die as married men in the same age bracket. For women between thirty and sixty-five the married women have a ten per cent advantage over the single women. Twice as many widowers die as do men who remain married.
—Fewer married people go to jail than single people.