If Your Mate Drinks, is He Temperate in the Use of Alcoholic Beverages? The dipsomaniac is an alcohol addict just as the opium smoker is a dope addict. He is characterized by an uncontrollable craving for alcohol. In some people alcohol produces a temporary feeling of well-being and elation, sometimes called euphoria. Because it does, people sometimes turn to drinking as an escape from their unsolved problems. Bit by bit the habit of drinking is built up. The person who marries a mate who is an excessive or habitual drinker in the expectation of reforming him is due for a bitter awakening. Marriage rarely cures drinking or any other abnormal condition. Expert treatment is needed. In skilled hands the drunkard is sometimes cured—if he really convinces himself that he wants to be cured. But the cure is long and arduous and the proportion of relapses is still great.
Is Your Mate Intelligent Enough to Earn a Living and Discharge the Responsibilities of Life Competently? There is no doubt that feeble-mindedness is inherited. Individual intelligence tests usually indicate that any person is feeble-minded who scores an IQ of seventy or less. (One hundred is average.) Even when sterilization of a feeble-minded person is performed it still does not seem reasonable to permit that person to marry since he can rarely contribute to the success of a marriage and often cannot earn a living.
Is Your Mate Fairly Stable, Well-adjusted and Able to Get Along with People? There are many shades of nervous disorders ranging from neurosis through psychoneurosis. The neurotic has a minor nervous disorder. The psychoneurotic has some ailment—without organic basis—which may involve hysteria, a paralysis or cramps. Many so-called miracle cures take place with persons who actually have no physical disabilities but have the disability in their mind.
In July 1945 such a “miracle” cure occurred at a military canteen. A 20-year-old soldier was walking painfully around on crutches. One of the junior hostesses asked him half-seriously if he would like to dance. He stated that he would but that he couldn’t even walk. She replied that she was a big strong girl who could hold him up. The soldier laughed, pushed his crutches under the table, stood up shakily, clung to a chair, then to the hostess. Getting started was difficult and he stumbled a time or two. Slowly they began to dance. Amazingly the soldier began having less and less trouble with his legs. They danced all through the evening and when the soldier left to take her home he was walking perfectly and left his crutches as a memento of his cure. As a result of a shrapnel wound he had become convinced he would never walk again. Under the stimulation of music, and the eagerness of a young girl to dance, the soldier forgot his crutches. So it goes with psychoneurotics. They are convinced that their neck is paralyzed, that they cannot hear or cannot see. Many such cases show immediate improvement once the war is over and the frustrations and fears of war lift from them. But others retain their bodily symptoms of psychological disturbance throughout their lives.
In this postwar world, marriageable girls will have to be concerned about the mental disturbances of some ex-service males. They should be sensible about these defects and realize they are merely a product of war-imposed frustrations. But they should be sure that they recognize the defects and are prepared to live with them. About twenty per cent of all war casualties returned to this country have been mental cases, and the fighting was so grueling in some theaters of war, such as the Solomons, that the percentages of psychological casualties have been known to rise at times to as high as forty per cent of all casualties.
A neurotic or psychoneurotic needs skillful treatment from a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist. A girl should hesitate to marry such a person at least until a medical authority has pronounced that he is competent to make the adjustments that a marriage entails and to fill the role of a mate successfully.