It is usually difficult to say of any marriage that any one of these forces alone caused the mating. It may have been physical attraction together with everyday companionship; or physical attraction and dissimilarity or strangeness, resulting in what we know as love at first sight. Or it may have been affection of slow growth, or affection with an element of appreciation of worldly advantage, or it may have been a little physical attraction with a great deal of desire for social position or wealth, or, ugliest of all, it may have been pure barter, without personal attraction of any sort. For these worldy advantages you offer, I will sell you my body and my soul.
To secure the finest marriages for girls we must insure three conditions: (1) high ideals of marriage among our adolescents, (2) better knowledge of men, and (3) wise companionships during the years from fourteen to twenty-five.
Margaret Junkin Preston
The South is justly proud of this poet of no mean rank who gave herself unstintedly to her home duties and responsibilities
Physical attraction on one or both sides is undoubtedly the greatest force in marriage selection. It is only when physical attraction exerts its influence upon a girl whose ideal of a husband is low or vague or incorrect that the danger is great. Physical attraction is not love, but it may be—often it is—the basis of love when it exists between two who are suited to a life together.
Generally speaking, girls will find married life easier, and their husbands will find life more satisfactory, when the two have been reared with approximately the same ideals. The girl who falls in love with a man largely because he is "different" from the boys among whom she has grown up often finds that very difference a stumbling block to domestic happiness. Marriages across such chasms where there should be common ground are more hazardous than between those whose education, social training, friends, and beliefs are of the same type. When they do succeed, they undoubtedly are the richer for the variety of experience husband and wife have to give each other; and, too, they show an adaptability on the part of one or both which argues well for continued happiness. Commonly, however, they do not succeed.