Are There Four or More Years Difference in Formal Education? There can be wide differences in schooling but only as long as the two people’s interests and attitudes are about the same. And in these days of wide reading, radio information, night schools and correspondence courses, two people may differ greatly in formal education but differ little in their informal education.
However, it does appear to be a fact that the happiest marriages seem to be those in which the two people met each other on a school campus, took similar curricula, lived in the same academic background.
Are There Wide Differences in Your Economic Background? This is closely related to the social differences. Mothers have encouraged wide differences in economic background by teaching their daughters to marry “up” the economic scale. They are urged to make “good catches.” It is only human for a mother to wish that her daughter will not have to scrimp as she has had to in her marriage. It also enhances a family’s social prestige if a daughter can marry “up.” However when there are wide differences in the incomes of the two sets of parents, those differences are accompanied by differences in social background which are often hard to reconcile. Added to this is the factor of acceptance that invariably arises when either a girl or man marries way above his own economic level. The parents and friends of the wealthy mate often assume that the other married for money. That may produce serious tension and create a lasting in-law problem.
Is There a Wide Difference in Age? One study has shown that the least happy marriages are those in which the husband is six to eight years older than the wife. Perhaps it is not the difference in age itself so much as the fact that people that far apart in age will be unlike in other respects which creates the strain on marriage.
The happiest marriages for wives seem to range from one extreme where the wife is four years older than the husband to the other extreme where the wife is four years younger than the husband. The happiest marriages for husbands seem to be those in which the husband is from one year older than the wife to where the husband is four years older than the wife. When all the evidence is analyzed it would seem that the happiest marriages for everybody concerned are those marriages in which the husband and wife are within one to two years of each other.
Are There Differences in Your Social Culture? Here is a girl who has been reared in the South. She was taught to be a lady, to be waited upon, not to work because she would have servants. Here is a man brought up in Nebraska, reared in a home where his own mother was hardworking, not only did the housework but occasionally helped milk the cows and helped do other chores for her farmer husband. With the Southern girl there has been a tremendous emphasis upon “family,” on social prestige, on doing certain things in certain precise ways. In the case of the Nebraska man, little of this formality has been present. Instead the emphasis has been upon hard work, upon thriftiness, upon a wife sharing heavily the responsibilities of earning a living. Two such widely differing philosophies are likely to produce grief in marriage. The war, with its tremendous shifts of population, produced a great many of these interregional marriages. They are certainly not doomed but the couples should face frankly the problems involved in a mixing of cultures.