9. If you and your prospective mate are constantly quarreling, have you stopped asking whose fault it is and started doing your best to prevent conflicts? Unless you two people settle your problems by compromise and mutual give-and-take, your marriage future looks dark.
10. Did you get engaged shortly after you first met? In most real love, an engagement rarely occurs before the couple have known and dated each other regularly for at least a year or longer.
11. Are you sure it is love? Could it be just loneliness, a desire to escape an unpleasant environment? Are you sure it isn’t a “phantasy ideal?”
12. Why don’t your parents approve this marriage? After all, they may have something. Look back in the past—weren’t they right many times then when you thought they were wrong? Unless your friends warmly approve this marriage, your parents are probably right in urging you to wait.
13. Do you really know your mate? What makes one a good date doesn’t usually make one a good mate. Although an hour’s enjoyment of dancing, going to the movies, etc. may be wonderful pastime, it may be far from what you need in a mate. Are you sure what you want in a mate is what you need? Are you sure that what you have found is what you need in a mate?
14. Last but not least is this prospective mate going to be the sort of parent you want your children to have?
When you have finished asking yourself these questions, you will probably have some good ideas what to do if you and your mate didn’t make a score above average. Take your time. It is easier to get married than it is to get separated or divorced, and much easier on one’s disposition in the long run. You want to marry but we want you to make a good choice and to find in marriage all the happiness and contentment that it can bring.
Procedure If You Are Doing the Matching Alone
Some readers may wish to see how they match with another person but would prefer to do the matching without consulting him. That can be done, though of course it will be much less accurate. Use the “Do You Match?” tables in this chapter, just as couples working together did. You won’t have much trouble scoring the last ten of the twenty-one items since they are based on known facts. Your greatest problem will be in estimating the scores your mate would make in the ten tests on personality traits. Your estimates will necessarily be rough approximations; but if you have known this person for several months you may have a fair idea how he would answer the various questions in those tests and estimate scores for him accordingly. Be rigidly honest when you imagine the answers this person would make. You can double-check your compatibility with such an absentee person by taking the following short test. It is a greatly abbreviated check on compatibility.