Page:Fielding - Sex and the Love Life.pdf/108
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CHAPTER V
PREPARATION FOR MARRIAGE
Looking Forward to Marriage—Importance of Preparation—Confusion of Ideals—Innocence and Modesty—Prudery—Marriage: Past and Future—Dual Moral Code—Status of Monogamy—Polygamy and Promiscuity—Fictitious Chivalry—True Love Must be Free—Woman's Intellectual Liberation—Its Beneficial Effects—The Realities of Marriage—Courtship as a Preparation—Not an Educational Substitute—Period of Intimate Association—Tactless Lovers in Courtship—The Vehement Wooer and Defensive Partner—Courtship a Continual Preparation—The Pairing Hunger—Length of Engagements—Long Engagements Often Injurious—Proper Age to Marry—Economic Hindrance at Most Favorable Period—Consanguineous Marriage, or Marriage with Blood Relatives—Between First and Second Cousins—Not Harmful in Itself—Unless Family History is Bad—Hereditary Traits Accentuated in Offspring of Blood Relatives—Either Good or Bad Latent Traits May Be Marked in Children.
Looking Forward to Marriage. Marriage is generally considered the most important step in life. A happy marriage is the ideal to which practically every young woman looks forward. This theme is the material with which, from girlhood, she builds her airy castles. And the average young man, too, is scarcely less concerned with this romantic prospect of his future, although he does not reveal it so obviously.
Still, with all this abstract interest in, and generalization over, the vital problems of marriage, no condition of life is usually entered upon with less preparation. The disastrous results that have followed in the wake of so many marriages—about one in every seven[1] now ending in divorce and
- ↑ Based on the Federal Census for the year 1924, as reported by the Department of Commerce. During that year there were in the United States 1,178,206 marriages performed, and 170,867 divorces granted.