Design for Marriage
By HUGH LYON* THE real trouble about people who want to be happily married is that they don't start soon enough. It is not just a matter of taking thought before getting engaged, nor even of being properly educated for family life. The first
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* Late Headmaster of Rugby, Chairman of -Executive, National Marriage Guidance Council. • essential is to take-the precaution to be born into a really happy home, with parents whose life together flows strong and clear beneath the little flaws and flurries of occasional irritations ; and the second is to be oneself the right sort of person, with those native qualities of sympathy and sensitiveness which no external influences can create nor altogether suppress. Those who have these advantages will ride out whatever storms may await them ; indeed, they may be faintly surprised at all the fuss and pother that people make about married unhappiness. They just don't know what it is.
But all are not so fortunate ; and for them too little has till recently been done by way of instruction for the - young, of guidance for the perplexed, of preparation for the engaged, of advice for the newly married, of succour for those already in the toils. Indeed, too little is being done now ; but organisations like the National Marriage Guidance, Council are at any rate attack- ing the problem with considerable energy and wisdom. War has been declared upon ignorance, and in all the hundred Marriage Guidance Councils in Great Britain there are resolute encounters with folly, impatience and premature despair. Education naturally comes first, and naturally. it must begin in the home, where questions are asked and must be simply and . truthfully answered, and where the first direction can be given to awakening interest ; it is in the home, too, that most of those -influences will be found which shape a child's attitude to love and marriage, influences which work independently of wish or intention, and are all the stronger for that. Victorian parents, -obsessed with the conviction that marriage was a mystery (which it is), and that sex was disgusting (which it is not), often bred in their family inhibitions and false shames ; their successors tend to combine with a sane view of sex (which is all to the good) a debased view of marriage which is going far to destroy the stability of the home. Somehow we have to restore the balance—to 'bring back to our conception of marriage some- thing of the revefence which we are in danger of losing, refusing to accept any view of it which falls short of the ideal of a life paftnership, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and 'in health, without disguising with a false veil of romance the hard discipline and continuous struggle which marriage so often brings with it today—and at the same time to welcome the frank and informed acceptance of all the truths about sex, without surrendering those principles of self-respect and self-control which should guide all our actions.
Much of all this can and should be done away from home, in schools, boys' and youth clubs, in talks with older counsellors. The danger here is that schoOls will be too exclusively biological, neglecting the emotional and spiritual for the physical, and that well-meaning advisers, seeking to adjust the balance, will be forbiddingly " moral " in their approach. Fortunately: the litera- ture available on the subject is nowadays far better than of old, and the boys and girls are no longer given stony sermons when they ask for the wholesome food of full information and sensible advice. It is cruel to pretend to the adolescent that all his worries will disappear if he clings to ideals of purity and self- control ; just .as it is wicked to suggest that he should not apply moral principles to the sexual part of his life as much as to any other. Life may well be a difficult business for him. Why pretend it won't be, or tempt him to evade his difficulties 'rather than overcome them ?
After this first stage of education come (often in rapid suc- cession) the boy-and-girl friendships, falling in love and the engagement. Each of these needs guidance, and each deserves at least an article to itself ; and about each there is jUst one thing to be said which has never yet been said often or clearly enough. It would have been a great help to_ many of us when we were younger if we had understood more clearly the differ- ences between the emotional reactions of men and women. Untutored boys and girls tend to expect from each other the same response to a stimulus that they feel themselves ; and when it is not forthcoming they plunge at once into dismay, indignation, recrimination ; and a promising friendship falls into ruin for want of a little psychology. As for falling in love, it is an emotion so overlaid with poetic fantasy and crude wit that those who have never known the real thing (which is probably unmistak- able) are too often deceived by substitutes, whether it be physical attraction or simply propinquity. We may look back and decide we fell in love at first sight ; but if we were wise we did not dignify that strong emotion with the name of " love " until we had made sure that heart and reason in due course approved the verdict of our eyes. And so the couple, rightly or wrongly, gets engaged, entering upon a contract which is nowadays far more formal and public than is desirable in the interests of happy marriage. The engage- ment should surely be a period of growing intimacy, during which two people are finding out whether they were right in believing that they could face the rigours of married life together. If they are right, then they should marry as soon as they are sure, and before the engagement brings a feeling of tension or frustration. But if they are wrong, then let them have the courage to confess it, however late in the day, and endure present misery 'and dis- appointment .rather than ensure a lifetime of unhappiness. If right use is made of the engagement, and the young couple have faced in advance the realities of 'married life today, then the strains of perpetual hard work and the difficulty of making one income serve for two will bring them closer together, and the period between the carefree honeymoon and the coming of the first child will make them still happier lovers and still fitter to be parents, still fitter to provide for the coming family that secure atmosphere where life flows strong and clear beneath the little flaws and flurries of occasional irritations.
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