In addition to the knowledge of each other's personal peculiarities there should be an understanding of each other's ideas as to the duties and responsibilities of their proposed relation to each other. I lately received a letter from a young woman who asks, "How freely do you think two engaged young people may talk concerning their future life? Would it not be indelicate for them to discuss their future relations, the possibility and responsibilities of parenthood, etc.?"
I answer, that depends on the young people. If they have false ideas, if they have little or no scientific knowledge, if their thoughts are filled with wrong mental pictures, they will not know how to talk wisely and beneficially. But these two young people are intelligent, are scientifically educated, are Christians. Their hearts are pure, their standards high, their motives praiseworthy. It would seem that they might talk as freely as their inclination would prompt. In fact there seems to me more indelicacy and more danger from long evenings spent in murmuring ardent protestations of love and indulging in embraces and endearments than in a frank, serious conversation on the realities and responsibilities of marriage, an exchange of earnest thoughts, voiced in chaste, well-chosen language—a conversation which by its very solemnity is lifted out of the realm of sense-pleasure into the dignified domain of science and morality.
CHAPTER XXXII.[ToC]
ENGAGEMENTS.
There now sparkles on your finger a ring that symbolizes the promise you have given to become a wife. You are engaged, and there now arises in your mind the query as to the conduct of yourselves during this period of engagement: How much of privilege shall you grant your lover? As you are promised to each other for life, are you not warranted in assuming towards each other greater personal familiarity? May you not with perfect modesty allow endearments and caresses that hitherto have not been permissible?
I take it for granted that you are not one of those unwise young women who permit themselves to become engaged for fun; who consider an engagement as of so little seriousness that it may be made and broken without regret. I have known girls who even enter into engagements just in order to feel justified in greater freedom of conduct without compunction of conscience. If such engagements do not violate the code of conventionalities they certainly infringe upon the moral code.
It is not strange that girls should fail to see all the dangers of such conduct—that they should not comprehend that thus they become sources of temptation to their lovers, and may even imperil their own safety.