TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

How to Pick a Mate

HOW TO
PICK A MATE

THE GUIDE
TO A HAPPY MARRIAGE

BY

DR. CLIFFORD R. ADAMS

Associate Professor of Psychology and Director
of the Marriage Counseling Service, Pennsylvania
State College. Member of the American
Association of Marriage Counselors. Director
of the Woman’s Home Companion Marriage
Clinic.

AND

VANCE O. PACKARD

Staff Writer, The American Magazine

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY, INC.
1946

Copyright, 1946, by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.

All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

FIRST EDITION

NO PART of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission in writing
from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who wishes to quote brief passages in connection
with a review written for inclusion in
magazine or newspaper or radio broadcast.

To
OUR TWO DAUGHTERS
and
OUR TWO SONS
Who Have Yet to Pick Their Mates

Contents

List of Tests

Foreword

As far as we know this is the first time anyone has written a book attempting to put mate selection on a sensible basis, despite the fact that sooner or later almost everybody selects one.

A good many people resent the idea of an outsider telling them how they should pick a mate. They think it smacks of meddling. Marriage is something sacred and personal. It should not be done according to rules. We heartily sympathize.

Unfortunately, however, marriages are not made in Heaven. Usually people marry by hunch or impulse ... or because their parents think it is a good match ... or because they get themselves so deeply involved romantically that marrying seems the only proper thing to do.

Too frequently such methods merely mess up a couple of people’s lives. More than a third of all the millions of marriages undertaken in the last ten years are in trouble. Many are already dissolved. Many more soon will be.

A great deal of research and counseling has now been done in the field of marriage, and the findings validated. At Penn State, for example, hundreds of couples who were tested before marriage at the Marriage Counseling Service are checked periodically after marriage to find how they are making out. Of all the marriages which the service predicted would be successful, not one has yet ended in divorce or separation. Most of the people who went ahead despite the clinic’s cautions are already in serious trouble or have been divorced.

As a result of many such investigations, reliable information is available on the kinds of people who make the best mates, and on the causes of marriage success and failure.

In this book we have tried to include those findings which should be most helpful and interesting to all people involved in love or marriage—but particularly to people who sooner or later will be taking unto themselves a mate. It is not our intention to lay down a set of rules for people to follow. But we hope that after reading this book you will be more enlightened in your hunches than you might be otherwise, and be a much happier and more desirable mate yourself!

How to Pick a Mate

Chapter I
Why Marry, Anyhow?

Mating is as old as Eve. In fact it is the oldest and most popular custom ever devised by mankind. Even in the most isolated tribes that explorers have uncovered on this globe adult males pair up with females to live together as man and wife.

In many areas of the world, it is true, marriages are still arranged by the elders, often at a neat financial profit to the bride’s parents. Freedom of choice in mating is a newfangled idea. And in Madagascar the groom is warned at the wedding that he can beat the bride all he pleases, but if he breaks any bones or gouges any eyes she has a perfect right to go home to mother. Yet even there mating is popular.

Though marriage is the most universal institution known to man increasing numbers of Americans are shunning it by divorce or otherwise. About ten per cent of our marriageable men have become unbudgeable bachelors. The number of women who are choosing careers to marriage is soaring. Moreover there are 1,500,000 men and women in America who tried marriage and are now living apart in divorce. Many others were divorced, then remarried.

Thus “Why marry, anyhow?” is today a fair question. So let’s face right at the start the main reasons why people do not marry, or stay married.

Many people do not marry because they don’t relish the idea of giving up their freedom, their independence. Some men do not like the idea of being “saddled” with family responsibilities and being “tied down” to one woman. Likewise, some women have become so accustomed to living alone—and are so reluctant to give up careers—that they hesitate to give up their independence, until it is too late.

Many other girls and men do not marry because they are too particular. Often they have a “phantasy ideal” of the mate they want and can’t find such an interested party in real life. Girls for example often sigh that they want a man “tall, dark and handsome—and graying at the temples.” Without realizing it at least a quarter of all girls yearn for a man who looks like their own father. And a quarter of the men pick someone who looks vaguely like their own mother.

There are still other people who don’t marry because they lack a decent opportunity. Girls who choose nursing as a career, for example, cut their marriage prospects at least fifty per cent. It is much the same for librarians and social workers. In fact a girl can reduce her chances of marriage merely by going to a girls’ college.

Then there is a large group who do not marry because they have been disappointed in love—perhaps an early love affair ended in disappointment or grief. It produced a psychological scar that prevented the person from achieving happiness through marriage with anyone else. The death of Ann Rutledge shook Abraham Lincoln so profoundly that though he finally married years later, for appearances’ sake, he was a miserable husband. A boy who imagines himself passionately in love and then is jilted by a girl who doesn’t even let him down gently may lose faith and crawl into a psychological shell in his relations with other women.

One college girl became enamored, during her sophomore year, of a prominent man-about-campus. She came from a fine Philadelphia family and was an attractive, sincere girl. But she was very naïve. This man began rushing her. He took her to parties at his fraternity, took her for several moonlight rides in his roadster, and told her she was the girl he had always dreamed of. Within three weeks she had lost her virginity. In a few more weeks he had lost interest and was off to make new conquests, and she came to the sickening realization that he had merely been exploiting her love for physical pleasure. Disillusioned, she had to change colleges to keep from facing her friends. She did not tell this story to the counselors at the Penn State Marriage Counseling Service (“Compatibility Clinic”) until two years later. During those two years she had been so crushed and full of bitterness that she had not let another man touch or even kiss her.

Occasionally men and women do not marry because they have family responsibilities—perhaps a widowed mother or younger orphaned brothers and sisters—which make them feel they can’t afford, or have no right, to take on a mate.

Still others have physical handicaps. There are some handicaps, of course, that are severe enough to be a real handicap, like the loss of both arms, but more often the handicaps are not serious in themselves. They are serious because the possessor magnifies them in his mind and begins feeling inadequate and inferior. The same applies to a person who thinks he is ugly. Irregular facial features in themselves are never a serious handicap if their possessor has self-confidence and a pleasant personality.

The main reason why people do not marry, however, is that they have an unhealthy attitude which makes it virtually impossible for them to adjust themselves happily to thoughts of marriage. They are full of fears about the obligations that marriage may bring.

Some are too selfish or too egocentric to be able to compromise; and in marriage as in any partnership the partners must be able to sacrifice their private desires for the common cause. Marriage is no place for prima donnas.

Other poorly adjusted persons are incapable of accepting the many responsibilities that go with marriage. Perhaps their mother or father tied them down so closely as a child that they never had a chance to develop their own feeling of self-sufficiency and independence. There are parents who cannot turn their children loose. They object to dating until the youngsters have become so old that learning to get along with the other sex is difficult.

Such children have a fixation for the parents and cannot see another person entering the picture as a possible substitute or replacement. This is called the Oedipus complex and it is no bogey dreamed up by psychologists. A boy may not marry because he is still jealously in “love” with his own mother. A girl may not marry because she is in “love” with her father. This kind of fixation is made more acute when the parent is selfish or lonely and builds a network around the child which makes escape impossible.

There are some people who are suspicious or jealous by nature. Their emotional instability usually frightens away prospective mates.

Many other people, particularly girls, have an unhealthy attitude toward marriage because they are frightened by the physical intimacies that go with marriage. A 29-year-old wife who had been married four years confessed recently that she dreaded the thought of physical intimacy with her husband. She had moved to another room and was in a rebellious mood. This wife unconsciously revealed a clue to her coldness when she related remarks her mother had made to her during girlhood. The mother had talked of her own agonies during the girl’s birth and had told how the process had injured her internally. The mother had talked of physical intimacy as one of the burdens a wife has to bear. One night, when the girl had been thus conditioned, a date stopped his car on a side road and tried to caress her. She was terrified. Now, twelve years later and formally married, she was still on guard.

The war gave many young people an unhealthy attitude toward marriage. A desire for a “last fling” impelled many of them to promiscuous behavior that has left them with psychological scars. Some men saw so many “loose” women near their stations and embarkation ports (and frequently had affairs themselves with such women) that their attitude toward all women was cheapened. Other young people—both male and female—were separated so long from contact with the opposite sex that they developed—or feared they had developed—unnatural feelings toward members of the same sex; or thought they lost the knack of making themselves seem attractive to girls or men, whichever the opposite may be.

A good many veterans saw so much of war and its destruction that they became cynical of human life and pessimistic about the future. This put them in an extremely poor mood to think of mating.

Yet to millions of other veterans war made marriage seem terribly attractive. After leading a shifting existence where nothing seemed real or permanent, the lasting, unchanging things in life appeared more significant than ever before. Marriage, ideally, is one of the most permanent things in life. It gives a person a chance to sink roots.

This brings us to the other side of the picture: why people do marry. There are thirty million married couples in America today, and they didn’t get married just because it is the customary thing to do.

Marriage must have something to offer. If you doubt it consider these facts:

—Married people normally live longer than single people. According to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company report of 1937, twice as many single men from thirty to forty-five die as married men in the same age bracket. For women between thirty and sixty-five the married women have a ten per cent advantage over the single women. Twice as many widowers die as do men who remain married.

—Fewer married people go to jail than single people.

—Fewer go crazy.

—Fewer commit suicide.

These facts would certainly indicate that married people are happier, better adjusted persons than unmarried persons, despite all the tales about henpecked husbands and browbeaten wives.

Then there are some very practical, hard-boiled reasons why it pays to marry.

For one thing it is cheaper for two people to live together than to live separately. It costs only two-thirds as much.

By marrying, a man becomes a better employment risk. Married men usually are regarded as more steady, more trustworthy employees than single men. This is logical. Marriage exerts a stabilizing influence on most men. An employer can assume that since a married man has taken on the responsibilities of a family he is a better risk than a man who has shown no ability to assume responsibilities. Another point is that the married man is less apt to leave a good job than a single man.

Furthermore a married person is regarded more favorably socially than a bachelor or spinster. This is not just a “ganging up” of spouses against anyone not similarly coupled, though that may be a factor. It’s a fact that there is a greater feeling of belongingness to the community for the married person than for the bachelor or spinster. A married man is better able to entertain acquaintances in his own home. And right or wrong most people feel there is something a bit unnatural about an adult remaining unmarried. Psychiatrists agree that except in exceptional cases women who live alone will become neurotic and frustrated. Living alone is an abnormal state for a woman. (She overcomes this hazard only by accepting her fate realistically and setting out intelligently to find enrichment and satisfaction in life.)

Married people are less lonely than single people because they have someone with whom to share life’s dull as well as exciting moments and to share their problems and hopes and ambitions.

Also married couples who raise families frequently have an insurance against old age—the knowledge that in their growing children there will be someone to take care of them if necessary.

Life is also more comfortable if you are married than if single, at least for a man. It provides him with home cooking in his own home and someone to keep his socks in order.

A basic argument for marriage is that it offers a logical division of labor. Imagine how much more complicated and inconvenient life would be if men had to do their own cooking and sewing, and women—all women—had to compete with men for a livelihood!

Finally marriage offers a legalized way to achieve sexual satisfaction. Men and women can receive relief from their bodily tensions without the terrible feelings of guilt, anxiety and remorse that often accompany unmarried love. That’s something. Modern psychology recognizes that sexual satisfaction is more than a physiological process of reproducing one’s kind. It is a psychologically satisfying activity and releases many nervous tensions as well as tensions brought about by hormonal or glandular needs.

Those then are the obvious, practical reasons why marriage is so universally popular. But beyond those are some important but less understood cravings which marriage satisfies.

—Beyond the desire for sex satisfaction, for example, is the yearning of both men and women to share the love and affection of somebody of the opposite sex, someone who takes a genuine interest in them. This sometimes is called a need for sexually colored companionship. This is why married people don’t feel the need to run around to shows and parties the way single people do. They have their own companionship within the family. Mark Twain, in his amusing “Extracts from Adam’s Diary” showed the bond created by such companionship when he quoted Adam as reminiscing:

“At first I thought Eve talked too much but ... after all these years I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning. It is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.... Wheresoever she is, there is Eden.”

—A desire for mastery on the part of most men and a desire to be led on the part of most women is another psychological motive that is satisfied by marriage. It is the thrill of mastery that causes a youth to careen dangerously down the highway at eighty miles an hour or to ride a horse at a break-neck gallop.

—There is a desire for pride that is satisfied by saying “my husband,” or “my wife,” or “my oldest kid.”

—There is a desire for security, a need both real and psychological, that afflicts all of us. We all like to know that there is someone who will look after us when we are sick, someone to comfort us when we are grieved, someone to help us when we are weary. Women particularly feel this need for security. In fact some observers who work a great deal in testing the reactions of women to the problems of life say that in women this yearning for security overshadows everything else. Women feel the need for security so much more keenly because, if nothing else, they are the “weaker” sex. They are more dependent on men for their livelihood.

Our returning veterans feel an intense need for another kind of security which marriage can give. After years of uncertainty, shifting, and tearing down of life and property they desperately want to get a hold on something permanent, and to many of them marriage looks like the very best way to do it.

—For much the same reasons veterans want to raise families. After so much destruction they want to build, they want to create life, life bearing their own likeness, life that will continue after they are gone. Watching and guiding one’s own children while they grow up is one of the greatest pleasures of marriage. A couple who deliberately abstains from having children is a selfish couple. Surveys show they mostly do it out of selfishness, the desire of the wife for a career or “dislike for children.” These reasons are those we would expect from maladjusted people. Certainly by voluntarily remaining childless they miss one of the greatest chances to achieve a happy marriage.

By achieving a happy marriage and having children many people make up for the frustrations and disappointments they have received from life, their dissatisfaction with their job and their own childhood. Children bring them compensation for their own failures.

—Finally, marriage enables two people to work together in setting up common goals and—by dreaming, planning, struggling—to achieve those goals. Perhaps the goal is to build a home or take a vacation trip to South America together or to put a son through college. The specific goals are not important. The enrichment comes from the two people’s merging their hopes and efforts toward one mutually-desired goal.

Getting married is one of the biggest steps a person takes in life. In fact, for most people life boils down to coping with three big problems:

—Learning to get along with people.

—Choosing a career and succeeding in it.

—Picking a mate and living happily thereafter.

The three are interdependent. Marriage counselors have noticed the significant fact that the individual who makes friends readily, who likes his work and is successful in it, is also the person who tends to choose an excellent mate for himself and work out with that mate a happy marriage.

Chapter II
Your Chances of Getting a Mate You’ll Like

First, you might ask, what are your chances of getting a mate of any kind? If you are a man, and are interested, you can be almost one hundred per cent certain you will marry. More than ten per cent of the eligible men today won’t marry, but that will largely be due to the fact that they prefer to remain bachelors.

If you are a girl the chances that you will marry are not quite as good. At the start of the war about thirteen per cent of the girls were failing to marry. The prospect now is that for several years after the war about fourteen or fifteen per cent will fail. It will be a good market for men.

Girls in some age brackets will be hit harder than others, and we sympathize with the girls past twenty-five who feel they were passing the peak of the eligibility curve for marriage while many of the best male prospects were still away in the armed forces. These girls have cause for concern. The surplus of grown women over men—which is something new in our population—has been increased by war casualties. And the number of men who prefer bachelorhood is apt to increase from ten per cent at present to perhaps fifteen per cent because the older a single man becomes the less he thinks about marriage. This war has created a great many “old” single men.

It is estimated that between two million and five million of the marriageable women in America today will never marry. Sociologists are already worrying about this “lost generation” of our women between twenty and thirty-five, with those in their late twenties presumably hit the hardest.

You may ask when a girl reaches the peak of her eligibility for marriage. In normal years the peak is between nineteen and twenty-one, and the curve declines markedly after the twenty-fifth birthday. Here are the chances for men and women to marry by certain ages:

CHANCES OF WHITE MALES AND WHITE FEMALES BEING MARRIED BY VARIOUS AGES (1940 CENSUS)

The odds for men show that only about one in ten marries before he is twenty-one; one in three marry at ages twenty-one to twenty-five; about three to ten marry between twenty-five and thirty, and about one in ten marries between thirty and thirty-five.

A factor unfavorable to the older girls, past twenty-five, is that as men become older they tend to marry increasingly younger girls. Normally, for example, a man of twenty-five will marry a girl of twenty-two, whereas a man of thirty-one will probably marry a girl of twenty-five. That’s why girls in the present twenty-five to thirty-five group may be hardest hit by the war. One encouraging possibility, however, is that veterans are looking for more wisdom and maturity in their brides than civilians of the same age usually do. There have been a good many reports of veterans marrying girls five and ten years their senior.

Idealistically, the best age for a girl to marry is from twenty-one to twenty-seven, and for a man from twenty-five to thirty.

Of all women who do marry, about fifty-six per cent are married by their twenty-fifth birthday, about eighty-four per cent by their thirtieth birthday and about ninety-five per cent by their thirty-fifth birthday. After thirty-five a woman has to get busy if she wants to marry!

Thirty-five is when an unmarried woman can no longer consider herself a “young maid.”

The marriage prospects for girls today would not be quite so unfavorable if our men would all seek mates. As it is, with from ten to fifteen per cent preferring to remain single, at least a million girls will not have an opportunity to marry. As far as we can gather the reason behind this masculine perversity is that boys, unlike girls, are not indoctrinated with the idea that marriage should be one of their big goals in life.

But why, you may ask, are there more eligible girls than men in America? The imbalance caused by the war is not the only reason. Here are some other reasons for the shortage of males that looms:

—Men die younger than women. The “weaker sex” is actually the tougher sex when it comes to reaching a ripe old age.

—Our male surplus of immigrants has been about used up. Immigration is a form of pioneering and has been considered primarily a task of man. When the flow of immigrants was heavy it accounted for many thousands of our male surplus. Now the flow has dwindled to a trickle.

—America is no longer a “young” nation. And of course the older our population becomes, the more feminine it becomes for the reasons mentioned above. There are still more boy babies born in America than girl babies (about 105 boys per hundred girls) but because the males die faster—both by natural causes and by accidents—the males slip into the minority now after the age of twenty-five.

War affects marriage in very peculiar ways. During the initial phase of World War II, marriages increased at a spectacular rate. This probably was due to the increasing prosperity (prosperity increases both marriages and divorces!) and by the psychological incentives to mate as a result of war. These include not only the impulses to elude the draft, but the yearning of a boy to keep some visible contact with home and the yearning of the girl to have some concrete commitment from a man when so many of them were leaving the community to go to war.

By 1942, 1,800,000 marriages took place in the country, the highest number in history. Then the rate started dropping off as men became more scarce, so that by 1944 the number of marriages was only 1,440,000. In 1945 the trend was changing. Judging from events after World War I, the postwar years will see a spurt in marriages that may take the rate to nearly two million a year for a couple of years. But that won’t change the fact that a good many girls still will not have a chance to marry.

But even if you do marry, what are the chances you will get a mate you like?

The answer depends a great deal on who you are. We can assure you that such mates will not come automatically. Right now there are at least a million married couples who are waiting to get a divorce. Millions of other couples tolerate each other but are not happy by any standards we could apply to them.

Many of the unsuccessful matches were “war marriages” hastily made. A study made after the first war, of marriages hastily contracted from 1916 to 1920 show that those marriages were less happy for both men and women than those contracted before the war. Another study showed that the marriages undertaken immediately after men came back from World War I were not—on an average—as happy as they would have been normally. The same will be true for many of the hurriedly contracted marriages in 1946 and 1947.

These studies substantiate the fact that much greater likelihood of mismating exists when marriages are hastily contracted, and especially when contracted at a time of high emotional excitement.

As this book is written one marriage in five is ending in divorce—and as we get further into the postwar years the rate will probably rise to at least one failure in every four marriages. Furthermore, if the long-range trends continue the divorce rate will be one divorce for every two marriages by 1975! Hollywood stars, and physicians in some states, are already close to that rate. That’s pretty depressing to contemplate when you consider that fifteen years ago the rate was one failure in fourteen marriages.

Perhaps the one encouraging aspect of the growing male shortage is that it may slow down the divorce rate. Divorces occur most frequently when men are plentiful. When men are scarce women tend to hang on to what they have and need to be provoked before they will fly off to Reno.

Why is the divorce rate rising at such an ominous rate? Admittedly there are deeper reasons than the war for the trend. Civilization, in becoming more complex, puts greater strains and stresses on marriage. Unhappy married couples are not held together as much as they used to be by fears inspired by hell-and-damnation religion. Our movies and soap operas present marriage in a fantastically unreal light. Finally, it seems that our standards for marriage happiness are now so low that people assume a couple is happy as long as the husband doesn’t beat his wife openly.

You may be interested to know that all the trends indicate that more divorced men remarry than do divorced women. In spite of the fact that each divorce separates a couple, in 1940 there were twice as many feminine divorcees who had not remarried as there were unmarried male divorces. The records also disclose the interesting fact that only about ten per cent of the women getting divorces ask alimony, and that only six per cent get it.

Your chances of getting a mate you will like are even affected by your sex. If you are a girl your chances are not as good as if you were a man. This is largely due to the fact that a girl cannot gracefully take the initiative in stalking a mate who looks attractive to her. Women enjoy being pursued, but men still don’t! They don’t want anything that seems too easy to win. If the woman takes the initiative—at least if she takes it conspicuously—the world will think her aggressive, and unladylike. She will be thought “common,” for instance, if she goes to the phone and asks a boy for a date or if she proposes marriage. Despite the progress of feminine emancipation during this century, and especially during World War II, this is still a man’s world. And probably feminism will be on the defensive after the war when the veterans return and many of the women will be expected to retire gracefully to the kitchens. At any rate, our present moral standards apparently make it much more difficult for a girl to win some possible mate who interests her than it is for a man.

Few of our younger people realize it but there are also a host of other factors that often limit the number of acceptable mates they are able to choose from.

Marriage counselors use the phrase “assortative mating” to describe the way two people of the opposite sex pair up on the basis of being pretty much like each other and living in much the same neighborhood. The term was first used to describe the way animals mate on the basis of similar size and color.

Today’s men and girls often set up criteria in selecting a mate that narrow their possible choices more than they realize. A man often has some pretty specific ideas on the kind of girl he wants to marry, and the girl has similar ideas about her husband-to-be. The chances of a person getting a mate he will like becomes less and less as he raises his qualifications.

In the early days of American life, when civilization was much simpler than it is today—and when people differed less in their social and economic status—a girl or man usually could find among five acquaintances someone suitable for marriage. The situation is decidedly different today. One authority in this field estimates that a girl, for example, needs to know twenty or twenty-five young men in order that she may have sufficient range to find someone eligible for her needs.

Let’s look at some of the little-considered factors that limit your choice.

How Old Must Your Mate Be? Many people who are looking for a mate think it is bad for the bride to be older than the groom. The girl is especially sensitive about this because she feels she may be losing prestige. Actually such marriages usually turn out to be happier than average because the girl is usually more eager to prove herself a good wife and is less apt to be a clinging vine; but that doesn’t change the fact that some people still frown on such marriages.

Society also frowns on matches where there is a great difference in age. For example marriages where the man is ten years older are viewed with alarm. For reasons not too well understood, marriages in which the husband is from four to seven years older than his bride are less happy than those involving any other age differences. However, if the man is eight or more years older, no special handicap seems to be involved.

Taken as a whole the happiest—and most socially approved—marriages are those in which the man is one to two years older.

How Educated Must Your Mate Be? All the studies that have been made of marriage show that as one’s educational level rises, an individual tends more and more to make a rational—and less emotional—choice of a mate. The educated man has a greater range of choice than the educated woman, because he is much more willing to marry under his educational level whereas a woman—again for reasons of prestige—is usually reluctant to do so. If she goes to college, she feels she has no choice but to restrict her selection to college men. By so confining herself and by leading a more cloistered life than her cousin who never went past high school, a college girl definitely reduces her chances of marrying. Whereas in the past nearly ninety per cent of our women have married, it is estimated that only about seventy-five per cent of college women have married!

How Much Money Must Your Mate Have? If you have money yourself or have it in your family you are more apt to make a hard-headed choice for a mate than one who has little money. He will marry more spontaneously. If you think back you may remember that during the depression of 1929-33 people of high economic status postponed marrying until more stable times whereas the people with small incomes went right on marrying, if they could possibly manage it.

Generally people tend to marry pretty much into their own economic class. The girl who was raised in the poor section of town and is now working as a sales clerk in a five-and-ten store may yearn to marry a sophisticated man from a wealthy family, but that is not the kind of mate she needs. It is doubtful that she could be happy with him because their differences are too great.

There are exceptions, of course. Occasionally we all read about, and cheer, a news report of a modern Cinderella but we usually frown when we read of the opposite: of a rich girl marrying a poor man. That somehow seems abnormal to us. The girl may lose caste. A man of moderate means who himself married a debutante expressed his views on such arrangements however when he said to us: “Never marry for money. But it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich girl!”

How About the Mate’s National Background and Religion? Are you an American of Italian extraction who would not consider marrying a girl of Swedish background? Or are you a Catholic who would not think of marrying anyone but another Catholic? You may have good reasons for your exclusiveness but the fact remains that your field has been narrowed.

How Is Your Job Affecting Your Prospects? People tend to marry mates who live conveniently near and who have similar interests. (About a fifth of all married couples meet each other at work.) A school teacher, for example, is much more likely to know school teachers of the opposite sex than to know physicians of the opposite sex. Yet many occupations are such that far more of one sex enter them than is true of the other. For example, there are normally nearly five women teachers to one man teacher; seven or eight feminine librarians to one male librarian; some twenty-five or thirty women in nursing to each man in somewhat similar work. Is it any wonder that the rate of marriage among school teachers, librarians and among nurses is much lower than average? Girls who choose nursing for a career cut their marriage prospects by at least 50 percent.

Finally, How Is Geography Affecting Your Prospects for Mates? Though the conditions of World War II broadened the matrimonial horizon of many men and girls as they moved about the country the fact remains that location is an important factor in confining the choice of millions of people.

In a study of several thousand marriages in Philadelphia it was discovered that four out of five young people there selected their mates from within their own city. In one out of three of the marriages the couple had lived within five blocks of each other before marriage.

Looking at the country as a whole, some towns and sections offer better marriage prospects than others. This is a little known fact. For example, the cities of New England offer the poorest possibilities for young women to marry of any section of the country. This is mainly because the textile industries in that area attract so many more women than men. Of the thirty United States cities offering the poorest opportunities for marriage for women, twenty-two are in New England. And of the thirty offering the best opportunities for women, about half are in Michigan, Ohio and Northern Indiana, where the automotive industries—which attract far more men than women—are located.

It is interesting to note that during World War II the marriage rate increased very rapidly in areas with new war industries requiring a great number of men—shipbuilding, aircraft, metal working. In Baltimore, the marriage rate went up nearly forty per cent; in Hartford, important in aviation, it went up twenty-five per cent.

Areas that consistently favor girls by providing a surplus of eligible men are the Far West and the Southwest, particularly Texas. The Deep South is much less favorable.

Where does your state stand on the ratio of eligible men to eligible women? The typical American male marries at about twenty-five and a half and the typical female at twenty-two and a half, or about three years earlier. Thus perhaps the fairest comparison would be to take the single men between twenty-three and twenty-eight and the single women between twenty and twenty-five. The following table shows how each state rates in such a comparison. It is based on the 1940 census.

NUMBER OF SINGLE WHITE MALES 23-28 YEARS OLD FOR EACH 100 SINGLE WHITE FEMALES 20-25 YEARS OLD

Nevada leads the list as the paradise for girls since there are 177 men there for each 100 girls. At the other end of the scale Rhode Island is over-populated with females (due to its many textile mills) and so is an unpromising place for girls to find a mate but a fine place for men. There are one hundred girls for every eighty-three men.

Notice that all of the first nine states offering the best possibilities for girls are in the West, and that the five most favorable states for men are in the East. Perhaps the old slogan “Go West, young man, go West” might be revised to read “Go East, young man; go West, young woman.”

There is another age range that needs consideration. That is, the groups who have not married by the time most people marry. These groups are the men between thirty and thirty-five and girls between twenty-five and thirty. Both these groups need to get busy because they face a very definite possibility of becoming crusty old bachelors or disgruntled spinsters. Since men past thirty tend to marry women who are more than three years younger than themselves it might be valid to compare the number of girls twenty-five to thirty to the men thirty to thirty-five. Here again the West is the great land of opportunity for girls while the Carolinas and the New England textile states are still less inviting to girls. One interesting thing is that in the Southern states of Kentucky, Virginia and Louisiana a girl’s ratio is pretty favorable up to twenty-five years but after that they become definitely not good places to find a husband.

If we take all single men as a whole and compare them to the single women, without regard to age, here is how the states seem to shape up:

Of the ten best states for women all are west of the Mississippi, and of the best states for men all but one is east of the Mississippi.

While the states themselves are pretty good guides as to where to go to pick a mate, the location within a particular state may be of even greater importance. For example, in Virginia, Norfolk rates as a fine place for a girl to find a husband but Richmond rates way down the scale. Here is a comparison of the number of white, single girls in the twenty-five to thirty age group and of the white, single men aged thirty to thirty-five in our 106 cities having a population of fifty thousand or more. (In such a comparison, incidentally, virtually all of our cities show a surplus of older girls over older men when those two age groups are compared. Here, however, we are interested only in the relative desirability of cities.)

Girls on farms and in small towns may fret to get to the big cities but their chances of marrying will be better in their rural communities, where there are 104 men for every hundred women, than in the cities where the ratio is ninety-six men per hundred girls.

Women’s colleges and all-male colleges may have their advantages educationally but they can deprive you of the chance for normal contacts with the opposite sex, and thus reduce your chances of marrying.

To get a fairly accurate idea of just what your marriage expectancy is, considering all factors, you should take the test reproduced with this chapter on “What Is Your Marriage Expectancy?”

If your expectancy rating is low do not become pessimistic. That’s the worst thing that could happen. Rather decide what you want in a mate ... find where such a mate exists ... establish friendships that will lead to introductions ... make yourself attractive to possible mates by studying their wants and needs and appearing to fill them. This is a formula that will get almost anyone a mate if he or she really wants one.

WHAT IS YOUR EXPECTANCY OF MARRIAGE?

This test should show pretty clearly whether your chances of marrying are good, or not so good. Be honest with yourself.

The correct answer to the first three questions is no, and to all the remaining thirty-one questions yes. If you answered twenty-five or more of the questions correctly then you have a high “expectancy” rating. If you answered only eight or less of them correctly then your chances of marrying are definitely poor unless you take action to improve your eligibility.

Chapter III
Are You Ready for Married Love?

The answer to this question is deceptively simple. You are ready if you are old enough. But how old are you?

There are several yardsticks besides the calendar for measuring your age. Educators enjoy telling the story of the wise young orphan. When a sweet old lady leaned over and asked him his age the young man removed his glasses, polished them thoughtfully for a minute and then replied:

“My psychological age, Madam, is twelve years; my moral age is ten years; my social age is eight years; my anatomical and physiological ages are respectively six and seven; but I have not been informed of my chronological age. That, I understand, is a matter of comparative insignificance.”

When we ask you if you are old enough to marry, we mean mature enough. And maturity, as it bears on your readiness for marriage, can be measured in at least five ways: physiological, mental, vocational, sexual and emotional maturity. By these standards some people are not old enough to marry when they are thirty-five!

How Old Are You Physiologically? The adolescence of the early teens is characterized by rapid bodily growth—growth in height, weight and sexual development. By eighteen, however, you are nearly as tall as you will ever be. Sexual growth, while not complete (especially for a girl), has reached a point where reproduction is possible. General growth slows down considerably and by twenty-four has just about stopped. For purposes of marriage the average person is “mature” physiologically by the age of twenty. But some require more time, because of glandular disturbances.

How Old Are You Mentally? We do not mean what is your I.Q., which is a measure of your capacity to learn, but rather the accumulation of your learning. In short, how wise are you? Normally a person must live twenty-one or twenty-two years before he has seen enough of life through schooling and practical experience to take on the responsibilities that go with marriage. If you have led a sheltered or one-sided life it will probably take longer.

How Old Are You Vocationally? A man, certainly, is not mature until he has established that he can earn a living. A college degree, a license to practice medicine, to teach, or to practice barbering are not enough. There must be a successful work record and that cannot be present until a person has used his vocational knowledge to make a living for a period of not less than one year.

Once it was thought that girls needed no special training vocationally but that notion is pretty well outdated now. Modern women like to feel independent, and frequently their ability to earn money is called into use. Perhaps the husband is a disabled war veteran, or perhaps the wife feels she needs a career to earn money. At the least, the girl entering marriage should already be capable of managing a home—and that requires skill and knowledge that can’t be learned in a night club.

Since some occupations require many more years of education and training than others, vocational maturity can fall anywhere between eighteen and twenty-six, but for most people it doesn’t come until about the age of twenty-two.

How Old Are You Sexually? Sexual maturity implies far more than the ability to beget or bear a child. Most morons can do this. Sexual maturity is largely determined by childhood and it is something most people either have or don’t have.

A youngster who was reared by parents who were well balanced emotionally, who were ready listeners to his problems, who explained comprehensively the magic and mystery of sex functions to him, will usually be ready to face the problems of sexual adolescence. During adolescence he will be subjected to many strains. He will undergo many glandular changes and begin to have sexual capacity. The reproductive apparatus approaches maturity between the ages of twelve and fourteen. The boy has emissions. The girl begins to menstruate. Both often are disturbed or even frightened by these new functions, unless the parent has been wise enough to prepare them for the changes.

During adolescence they start “dating,” which at first is done self-consciously and awkwardly. Their state of mind is made more nervous if the parents tease or ridicule these first steps in courting.

When the boy and girl emerge from adolescence about the age of eighteen, they have achieved sexual maturity if all has gone well. If so:

—There is freedom from repression and inhibitions concerning sex.

—There is no disgust or aversion as far as sex is concerned.

—Likewise there is no abnormal curiosity or longing for sexual information or experience.

—He or she may still be shy or self-conscious at first when in the presence of someone of the opposite sex but both soon get over it when they find activities to share. This is normally easy because by eighteen youngsters have acquired skill in dancing, card playing, sports, hobbies, and conversing.

If by eighteen or twenty a person hasn’t acquired sexual maturity in the sense described, it might be a good idea to consult a marriage counseling bureau, a college psycho-educational clinic, a psychologist or some other person trained in helping normal people achieve normal adjustments.

How Old Are You Emotionally? This is by far the most significant of all your ages in determining your readiness to marry! Most of the research on marriage indicates that people who lack “emotional maturity” rarely achieve a happy marriage.

What is emotional maturity, you may ask? It’s a state of mind that includes ability to get along with people ... ability to find satisfaction and reward in work ... ability to recognize and solve problems which involve your relations with others ... and finally it includes freedom from instability and neuroticism.

As in sexual maturity (which is closely related to emotional maturity) the first ten years of life are apparently the most important in determining if you will be emotionally stable. Certainly by the age of eighteen a person should have a pretty firm hold on his emotions. If he has not acquired such balance by twenty-one or twenty-two the outlook is not too promising, and he should deliberately set out to achieve better control of himself.

A stenographer of twenty-four came to the Penn State Marriage Counseling Service for advice after she had had a dozen promiscuous affairs with men. She came from a broken home where her parents had taken only an erratic interest in her and she showed serious signs of emotional instability, as do virtually all promiscuous girls and men.

Here is the verbatim report that was written on Sandra. It provides a classic picture of emotional instability:

Sandra feels inferior, does many unconventional things, has few standards or ideals. Badly maladjusted, she flits from one boy to another, seeking new thrills. Quite promiscuous and highly sexed, she has had sexual affairs with 12 or 13 men. Somewhat popular while in college, with attractive face and nice figure, she was dated by many boys, none of whom even went with her for more than four dates. Easily persuaded to any course of action, she could readily excuse any breach of behavior. Changeable and selfish, but anxious to be known as a “Campus Queen,” she openly sought dates and a sort of dubious and short-lived popularity.

Because of her instability, total lack of standards, ideals and morals, and her selfishness and shallowness, she is unlikely to marry unless she catches a rich “sucker.” She is in six “danger zones” on her Audit Profile. May the Lord help the poor man who is inveigled into marriage. No boy has ever proposed marriage to her, a fact that has hurt her vanity.

To pin emotional maturity down more specifically, here side by side are eight traits, one or more of which are frequently noted in persons who are considered “emotionally immature,” and eight noted in mature persons.

A person can be emotionally unstable and not show all of those symptoms but he undoubtedly will show some of them.

What can anyone do to improve his control over his emotions, and thus achieve greater emotional maturity? Here are a few suggestions:

—Try to look at yourself objectively. Try to do so especially in connection with your relations with others. Are you reasonable rather than prejudiced? Can you recognize that a man may be a fine person even though he is a Republican or a Democrat, that he is a good person even though he may be a Protestant or a Catholic? Do you honestly try to make decisions on the basis of facts rather than on the basis of feelings, or imaginary facts that are more agreeable to you? Sit down every few weeks and try deliberately to look at yourself as others must see you. Would you like yourself if you were someone else?

—Learn to laugh at yourself. The person who can laugh at himself, or who can laugh at the things he loves and continue to love them, is the person who is most likely to have insight into himself. And that insight is important in emotional maturity. If you have a sense of the ridiculous you can see fun in many of your own activities, and in doing so are able to relax and feel happy. You learn to laugh at your troubles, yet at the same time do your best to improve the situation. This ability to see the ridiculous side acts as a cushion and helps you maintain your stability, even when things are most exasperating.

—Set up a confidential relationship with some other person. Telling your problems to another person helps you define the problem in your own mind, it furnishes relief from the tensions you have built up, and it brings another person’s point of view into the picture. One of the biggest single values in marriage is the fact that it provides husband and wife a confidant in each other, and gives them the confidential relationship that is so important to mental integration.

—Seek work that satisfies you. Nothing will prevent you from getting a hold on your emotions more than being confined every day to work that is disagreeable to you. If you find it is uninteresting or doesn’t challenge you or doesn’t offer any opportunity as a stepping stone to more challenging work, change jobs. But do it intelligently, because the person who is a frequent job-jumper is not a good marriage risk.

Recently we talked to a man who is forty-four years of age. He had been divorced once, is now unhappily living with a second wife, wants to divorce her and marry a third woman. His job record shows that he has held thirty-nine different jobs in his life. Is it any wonder that he is unlikely to find happiness or stability in life? He does not know what he wants, can’t learn from experience, and is pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp.

—When you have a problem face it squarely. Define the problem, get all the facts, and line up alternative solutions in case the first course isn’t successful. Many people seem incapable of defining their problems. When they are faced with a frustrating situation, they frequently are unable to vary their attack upon it. When a girl can’t get her way she cries. Crying may bring her some reduction of tension, but it does not solve the problem. The emotionally mature person can keep his head, figure out something to do, but the immature person gives up or cries or gets drunk.

We have devoted so much more space to your emotional age than to the other four ages—physiological, mental, vocational and sexual—because it is so fundamental to marriage success. If you find after reading this chapter you want to know more about developing your own maturity, you will find further suggestions in the chapters “Getting Along with the Other Sex,” “Attracting the One You Want,” and “Crucial Traits for Marriage Happiness.”

When all the five “ages” are taken into consideration it would seem that a girl should not consider marriage until she is at least nineteen or twenty and the man should not before he is twenty-one or twenty-two. Those are minimum ages for normal men and girls. Those who develop slower than average in any of the five ages should try to wait a year or two longer before deciding about marriage.

ARE YOU OLD ENOUGH TO MARRY?

Your chronological age is not as important as some of your other ages in determining whether you are ready for marriage. The informal check below may give you a rough idea of your maturity for marriage.

Give yourself one point for each yes answer. You should have a total score of at least twelve and should have no less than two yes answers in each category if you are to be judged old enough to marry.

ARE YOU GROWN UP EMOTIONALLY?

More than almost anything else, your rating on “emotional maturity” reveals your chances of achieving a happy marriage. Here is a more detailed test of your rating on this crucial trait. Answer yes only if you are sure.

If you honestly answered yes to fourteen of these or more you are more mature emotionally than the average person. If you answered yes to sixteen or more you should have an exceptionally good chance for a happy marriage.

Chapter IV
Is It Love—or Infatuation?

“Love” is unquestionably the most abused word in the English language. People “love” puppies, or they “love” ice cream. Women commonly close their letters to acquaintances with the word “love” as do all relatives when they write to one another. Boys trying to get a kiss from their girl friends mumble something about love. That’s to make the giving easier for the girl.

Then there are different kinds of genuine love. A mother loves her two-year-old baby just as wholeheartedly as she loves her husband. And she loves her husband now just as much as she did as a girl eight years ago when she “fell” in love with him, but the love is different. She was more misty-eyed then. She didn’t realize it but the earlier love was heavily flavored by sexual attraction. Now sex is still present in her regard for her husband but the bond is primarily a deep feeling of comradeship. And with the baby, of course, true sexual feelings are not involved at all.

In all three of the cases, however, she had developed a deep concern for the welfare of the loved one; and in all three of the cases the loved one had similar feelings of attachment to her. Right here you have the gist of true love, whether parental, conjugal or romantic.

Still, it is often difficult to know if your “love” is the real thing. Two out of five of the girls who come to the Penn State Marriage Counseling Service for advice about their affairs think they are in love but aren’t sure.

One girl was really confused. She reported that she was terribly in love with two different men at the college. One was on the basketball team. The other played in a campus orchestra. She did not know which one she loved the more and wanted to be told which to choose. Tests soon established beyond a doubt that she had the warmest kind of physical feeling for both men. But the tests also showed that she was primarily fascinated by them as “catches.” She wasn’t actually in love with either, and was so informed.

She was the victim of double infatuation. How can you tell love from infatuation? Dr. Henry Bowman of Stephens College offers these points of distinction:—

Infatuation may come suddenly but loves takes time.

Infatuation can be based on one or two traits (usually including sex appeal) whereas love is based on many traits.

In infatuation the person is in “love” with love, whereas in love, the person is in love with another person.

In infatuation the other person is thought of as a separate entity and employed for self-gratification. In real love there is a feeling of identity with the other person.

Infatuation produces feelings of insecurity and wishful thinking whereas love produces a sense of security.

In infatuation you suffer loss of ambition, appetite, etc., whereas in love you work and plan to please the other person.

The physical element is much more important in infatuation than in love.

Infatuation may change quickly but love lasts.

In general you can be surer that it is really love if it has developed over a period of time rather than if it comes all of a sudden.

But, you may ask, how about those couples who are “meant for each other” and “fell in love at first sight.” Both are nice romantic notions, but both have little validity in fact.

There is no one person in the world for anyone. We don’t expect happily married couples or happily engaged couples to believe that but all the evidence indicates it is true. There are hundreds, indeed thousands, of people that you could fall in love with and be happily married to. (And there are, of course, thousands and perhaps millions of people you would be miserable with as mates.) The only sense in which there can be a “one and only” for you is that there may be only one good prospect within your range of possible acquaintanceship. It is the multitude of good possible mates that sometimes makes it difficult for a girl to choose between two men. It is the multitude of possibilities that produces triangular situations after marriages; and it is this multitude of available mates in America that makes it possible for a girl to find and love a man in her own community rather than to have to go from Maine to California to meet a “one and only.”

As for instantaneous love, a girl has about as much chance of “falling in love at first sight” as she does of becoming Cinderella. At times couples experience “infatuation at first sight” which may or may not later mature into love. And ordinarily the infatuation is based about eighty per cent on sexual attraction. “Love at first sight” also often occurs when you come across someone who happens to match your “phantasy ideal” for a mate. If you have always dreamed of a bride with large brown eyes, a turned-up nose and a shapely figure—and you are ripe for mating—you fall for the first girl matching that description. It is a mighty hazardous way to try to pick a mate.

Other people think they fall in love “at first sight” because they are desperately anxious to have some one to hold to, and clutch at the first person who comes along. They suffer from feelings of insecurity. This was particularly true of girls during the war. One girl who came to the Penn State clinic was rapturous about her coming marriage to an army lieutenant stationed temporarily at the college. Why did she love him? She was pretty vague about that and seemed to resent the question. What did they have in common in the way of interests and ideals? The only thing she could think of was that they both liked to bowl. It soon developed that what she was in love with was the idea of getting married. She was twenty-seven and nervous about her future. That she was sincerely convinced she was in love with the man was a tribute to her own powers of self-deception. She realized that she should in all decency be in love with the man she was going to marry, and convinced herself that she was.

Frequently two people fall so madly in “love” soon after meeting that they feel they must marry immediately. This tendency is so well known that most marriage counselors rightfully question if a state of true love exists when the two people feel they will die if they don’t get married tomorrow or next week. Real love can wait. It can make sacrifices; it is not something that has to be rushed. The more urgent the desire to get married immediately, the greater the likelihood that it is infatuation and that the infatuation may die out as abruptly as it sprang into being.

But why, you may ask, is love at first sight so improbable? Why can’t you fall in love as easily immediately as you can after weeks of knowing each other?

Here we get to the essence of love, which Webster’s dictionary defines as: “Desire for, and earnest effort to promote the welfare of, another.” Love is not a trap you fall into. It is a state of respect for and comradeship with another that has developed from the fact that you both have similar tastes, ideals and yearnings. Such comradeship cannot come as a result of one date.

Cynics have said that “love is of all feelings the most egoistic and consequently is, when crossed, the least generous.” That assumes love is possessive and selfish. Genuine love as we understand it today is the medium through which the fullest development of the personalities of a man and woman may take place. And it involves a keen desire for the welfare of the loved person. There is nothing egoistic about real love!

Here briefly are some conditions that are usually present before love can develop:

—The two persons have had experiences together that have caused each to react favorably to the other.

—They have each found present in the other qualities, standards and ideals which they admire.

—Their sexual feelings have been so favorably conditioned, without their realizing it, that they find great pleasure just in being in each other’s presence.

—Each one in some way fulfills some of the motives that are of importance to the other, such as desire for social approval or, with a man, mastery.

There are many people for whom it is utterly impossible to fall in love. For a few this is due to physical inadequacy. But to most it is a result of unfavorable conditioning that has made them selfish or afraid of contact with the opposite sex. How does a person get the ability to fall in love? From a physical standpoint certain hormones pour into the blood stream of a man or woman past puberty that create sexual tension. But that only starts to explain the complexity of the love relationship.

Your ability to fall in love depends for the most part on your own previous experience as far back as childhood. In the beginning, for example, your mother met all your needs. Every time you cried your mother rushed to you, to feed you, to give you a drink, to change your diaper or to remove a pin that was sticking in you. Gradually in your mind the mother becomes associated with everything pleasant, with eating, the relief of thirst, the elimination of pain. You probably became attached to her with a depth of love and affection that lasted for many years. Similarly your mother received pleasure from hearing your coos when she gave you relief from pain, she received the approval of your father for bearing you and the admiring comments on you from the neighbors; and she satisfied her motive of mastery by having something (you) under her control. Her love deepened for you.

It has been observed in the South, where the nursemaids may often spend more time with the child than the mother does that the child becomes more favorably conditioned to the nursemaid than to the mother. That illustrates that love is a learned process.

As you grew older and began playing with children you learned to like those with whom playing was fun and you learned to dislike those where your association was marked only by dissatisfaction and unpleasantness.

Similarly if your early associations with those of the opposite sex were all marked by unpleasantness and nervous tension you tended to stick to those of your own sex; but if they were marked with pleasure you turned more and more to the other sex.

Even the appearance of the girl that a young man likes is due to pleasant associations with other persons who had one or more of the characteristics that his girl has. It is not just accident that girls are more likely to fall in love with boys who have characteristics resembling their own fathers than they are with boys who don’t. Similarly a boy is more likely to fall in love with a girl who resembles his own mother than with a girl who doesn’t.

If your early life has been marked by strife in the home and tension in your relation with people your own age, then you have been poorly conditioned for the comradeship married love can provide. And you probably will have the greatest difficulty finding happiness in marriage.

But if your relationships with people have been relatively serene, you will find it easy to learn to love someone of the opposite sex. You will find that when you do certain things you receive approval by way of happy smiles and rewards. Gradually you learn to put your best foot forward. You and your date both are conditioned to be on your best behavior and if you have many things in common develop a deep friendship with each other.

Then, if the conditioning during the friendship is quite favorable, your mutual feeling of appreciation and affection for each other grows and finally ripens into love. There you have it.

In your love for each other you will both gradually become sexually vibrant and you both will begin to feel a need for sexual expression through each other. As this need becomes increasingly strong, you both begin to think of engagement and marriage. Ideally when your need for each other becomes so strong that it can no longer be denied, you are married.

ARE YOU REALLY IN LOVE?

The first thing many counselors like to find out when people come to them about the possibility of marrying is to find out whether they are actually in love. Here are some questions which quickly disclose whether a person is afflicted with the real thing or is just infatuated by good looks and sex appeal. Answer each question truthfully regardless of what you think the correct answer should be.

If you have a perfect score you answered every third question (3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24) with No and all the others with Yes. Did you have twenty or more “correct” answers? If so, we would judge you to be solidly in love. If you did not, you should be skeptical until you receive further proof.

Chapter V
Growing Up Sexually

Your ability to undertake marriage successfully has already been determined in large part before you even start. It has been determined by experiences you have had with sex generally and with the opposite sex particularly. Possibly you are already seriously handicapped by repressions and fears on the subject.

To ignore or fear sex is no more sensible than to ignore any of the other emotions you possess. Sexual desire is a natural desire. Without it your personality would become impoverished. Without it there would be few marriages. Without it there would be few children and few homes. Sex is nothing to be ashamed of or be whispered about.

You can have love without sex and sex without love but neither alone is very satisfying or enriching. For example many men are capable of sexual activity with women for whom they could find no pleasure in social associations. Were it not for this fact there would be no prostitution. Likewise it is true there are many wives who love their husbands and engage in sexual activity with them, but without feeling any sexual urge whatsoever and without feeling any physical satisfaction.

The ideal arrangement, however, is that in which the two people have genuine love and affection for each other and at the same time have strong sex desire for each other and find sexual satisfaction in each other.

A very large proportion of the fears, repressions and anxieties that people suffer from involve sex one way or another. Many of these repressions are revealed in such things as frigidity and impotence. The individual who is ashamed and afraid of sex will be repressed in married life unless the attitude is corrected, and will find it difficult to adjust to marriage. When such persons are married the feelings of shame or guilt about sex may prevent sexual satisfaction. This lack of satisfaction, and the tension that goes with it, may produce nervousness, aches and pains and even nervous breakdowns.

Many married people, particularly wives, suffer from repression. While sexual maladjustment is not the only cause of unhappiness in marriage it does play a significant part. It is estimated that one-fifth of all married people turn to masturbation as one of the ways to reduce the sexual tensions not satisfied through intimate relationships with the mate.

How do these so-called repressions develop? Where do we learn about sex?

Our sex experiences—whether good or bad—started when we were babies. We reacted in a very favorable way to the fondling, caressing and other skin stimulation of our mothers. Love and affection came to be associated in our minds with fondling and stroking. Sometimes as the baby grows older the parent lavishes too much affection on the child because the mother is hungry for affection which is not forthcoming from her husband. This excessive love-conditioning may cause the child to become intensely attached to the mother and makes it difficult for the child to break away as it grows up. Not only this, but in addition the excessive fondling and favorable attention may cause the child to have an excessive desire for sympathy and social approval. Ergo, we have a “spoiled child.” This spoiled child grows up feeling very sorry for himself and insecure when he is not receiving sympathy. In marriage, he or she becomes quite possessive because he or she wants to be the constant center of attention.

But to get back to when you were a growing child. Many of the feelings of guilt, shame or fear that people suffer from concerning sex begin then.

Perhaps the child is detected in the act of exploring his sex organs. It is probably normal curiosity but the parents punish him so severely that the child feels exceedingly guilty about it.

Perhaps the child hears a four-letter Anglo-Saxon word. Proud of this new acquisition he comes home and uses it with his parents. The parents are dumfounded, show their intense disapproval, and may wash the child’s mouth out with soap.

Or perhaps the child asks how babies are made and the parent may rebuff the child or act so mysterious that the child concludes he has done something for which he should be ashamed.

On the other hand, if as a child you had a confidential relationship with your parents and found that when you took such problems to them they would try to give you answers you could comprehend you developed a normal, healthy attitude toward sex. Repression usually occurs only when something happens to us for which we feel ashamed or guilty or fearful.

It would seem to us that no child should be permitted to reach the age of five or six without knowing where babies come from. It furthermore seems to us that no child should reach the age of ten without knowing what produces or causes babies.

Now we come to the period that affected you most profoundly in your sexual development, puberty. Can you remember how your life and body were changed from the time you were twelve to fourteen?—that is, when you were first endowed with sexual capacity. Whether you were a boy or girl, your sex glands (gonads) began pouring their hormones into the blood stream in great quantities. Perhaps you did not realize it at the time but you began feeling more tense, more energetic, and began exhibiting what might be called “animal spirits.” Farmers shake their heads sadly at their youngsters during this period and resign themselves to the fact that the youths won’t be over “Fool’s Hill” until they are sixteen.

It probably was during your early teens that you had your first great “love” affair, if you were normal. Puppy love is one of the sweetest loves that one ever has. It usually makes its appearance at about the time the girl begins to menstruate and the boy becomes capable of having sexual emissions.

This first love of yours was romantic and idealistic. Probably you “fell in love” with a girl in the next aisle, passed notes to her and picked flowers on the way to school for her. You walked home together after school and if you did manage to conquer your embarrassment and kiss, it is a kiss you will never forget.

You did not realize that those hormones pulsing through your body were responsible for this “crush” and did not realize why you were more tense and energetic. To reduce the tension, though, you looked at each other and something about your past conditioning made each of you find something appealing in the other. Sometimes these first “loves” endure but more likely you are soon both in “love” with new “flames” that suddenly appeared more appealing. Puppy love, you see, is an early version of infatuation.

As a child your sexual feelings were diffused over the body surface but with puberty those feelings came more and more to be localized in certain sensitive areas of the body, called “erogenous zones,” if you had normal contacts with the other sex. In the case of girls whose contact with sex is carefully guarded, however, it is quite possible that sex desire may remain diffused until marriage and the loss of virginity.

The appearance of the menstrual discharge can be a profoundly frightening event for a girl unless she has been prepared to expect it. Often it marks the beginning of fears that carry over even into marriage.

Take the case of Alice, a school superintendent’s daughter, who was reared in a stern atmosphere of morality. When she asked where babies came from her mother first rebuked her and when she persisted in inquiring the mother said they were brought in the medical bags of physicians. When she reached the age of menstruation, for which her mother had not prepared her, she thought a terrible calamity had befallen her. She naïvely believed for several months that she was having a baby. Later the only information she ever acquired on sex was through bull sessions with other girls at college, and there the information was misleading. She was fearful of sex and when, during her freshman year, a boy tried to kiss her she reacted very strongly. She felt that she must not be a nice girl or a boy would not think of trying to kiss her. Her mother had told her that nice girls did not kiss boys.

Today Alice is twenty-nine and still not married. Furthermore she seems like a very poor prospect. She has reacted frigidly to all overtures of grown men to kiss her even though she feels she should marry. To her “sex” is animal passion and its only rightful function is reproduction. She has so many repressions about sex that she cannot act normally in the presence of someone of the opposite sex.

Here is how the repressions operate with Alice. She does her best not to think about sex. She avoids situations or circumstances that would involve sex by staying away from people of the opposite sex, by not going to dances and by refraining from doing things that would in any way bring sex to mind. Her life is a desperate hide-and-seek with sex. Furthermore her repression is so effective that she won’t even admit that a sexual problem exists for her.

Sometimes direct fear conditioning may occur. In one girl who was referred to the Penn State clinic there was an intense fear of being with well-educated people. When all the facts were learned, it was discovered that in her early teens the girl had been detected masturbating by her mother. To frighten her out of the habit the mother told her that such a practice would change her facial appearance so much that any educated person looking at her would know she was a masturbator. The girl, already ashamed of her habit, felt so much guilt that she started avoiding anyone who had a college education because she believed such people could see her secret in her face. It took many months of treatment to get her to the place where she could associate with college people with ease.

It is our opinion that much of the sexual maladjustment of the world is brought about by parents giving their children the impression that sex is shameful, disgusting, fearful or nasty.

One young man came into the psychological clinic complaining of severe indigestion, heartburn and excruciating stomach pains. When asked what he thought the trouble was he said it probably was caused by his habit of drinking a couple of beers three or four times a week. He had made many efforts to stop drinking the beer, but in vain. The companionship of the other young men with whom he drank, the feeling of tension reduction that he felt while drinking, the partial release of some of his inhibitions under alcohol all prevented him from breaking the habit. He had never been drunk yet he was sure that the half-dozen glasses of beer a week were causing his stomach trouble and would ultimately lead to ulcers or cancer.

In working with this young man it was found that he had begun masturbating in adolescence. His father had discovered this and had severely denounced him for the practice. The boy could not, or did not, give up masturbation and was in constant fear that he would go insane because his father told him that continued masturbation always led to insanity. In reading an old-fashioned book on sex which his father gave him, the boy ran across a statement to the effect that alcohol weakened the sex drive. He was so anxious to reduce his own drive, for fear of insanity, that he began drinking beer habitually. He was so sure the alcohol was reducing his sex drive that he stopped masturbating. Actually, of course, the sex drive was still present and his repression and anxiety were transferred from masturbating to beer drinking, with the physical symptoms already described. By helping the young man understand how he had become unfavorably conditioned to masturbation (which, while an inferior or substitute adjustment, is a natural act) he lost all of his stomach symptoms and gained a wholesome attitude about sex.

How can sexual inhibitions and repressions be “unlearned?” The best thing to do of course is consult a good clinical psychologist or competent psychiatrist. Extensive psychotherapy may be needed. But here are some things that an individual can do that may help:

—Develop a friendly confidential relationship with some other person who can be trusted and bit by bit unburden yourself of your fears, anxieties, problems and frustrations. Simply getting things out of one’s system brings tension release. Not only that but as one talks about his problems and feelings toward them, he begins to define the problem and see possibilities of attacking and solving the problem himself. And the friend may have some helpful suggestions.

—Deliberately associate with people of the opposite sex as much as possible if repression is present. Gradually this will help reduce tensions as you become used to them and if the conditioning is favorable you may achieve wholesome and normal reactions to the opposite sex.

—Acquire adequate information about sexual behavior. Good books are available today in the field of sex (note [bibliography] in the back of this book).

—Even bull sessions can be helpful though much of the information you will hear may be erroneous or inadequate. The freedom of expression in the sessions and the opportunity to talk help one feel less repressed and more natural when sexual matters come up.

All young unmarried people should realize that the sexual emotion is just as much a hunger as a hunger for food and that in marriage their personality is enriched when the sexual hunger is satisfied.