HEALTHY ADJUSTMENT IN MARRIAGE

 HEALTHY ADJUSTMENT IN MARRIAGE

MARRIAGE HAS been described as the "incredible entanglement of two people." If incredible, such entanglement has proved to be the most suitable and durable means by which most men and women achieve emotional gratification. A merger involving two personalities, each with his and her own individuality and distinctive familial background and standards, is not and never has been uncomplicated. You may hear it said that the American family is heading for collapse. But such ominous predictions have long been made. Early in the century, some writers seemed to think that horse and buggy reins had been the ties that had bound the family together and "the citizen, shaken loose from his safe domestic base by much streetcar straphanging, takes to socialism and drinking.

The matron, without the steadying discipline of having to get home in time to feed the horse, gads and grows extravagant." If marriage and the family today face changes and problems, they have always done so. Every generation has its problems of progress. The Victorian era-patriarchal, well ordered, and romanticized ever since-- lasted only half a century and constitutes a small part of our heritage. Perhaps, as sociologists point out, if there is an American norm, it is the frontier tradition of breaking away from the Establishment at an early age, and young families today resemble the pioneers who fought the wilderness. They fight a new kind of wilderness, not geographic, but psychological and moral. They are almost constantly on the move, with jobs taking them from one city to another, one region to another. They "do it themselves"; household help virtually does not exist any longer nor the handyman for hire nor the quickly available, reasonably priced serviceman.

 With disruption of many once-fixed values, with the moving about that does not allow the continuity that can be a stabilizing influence for children, young parents must and do compensate, working harder at understanding their children than any parents before. Perhaps in reaction to having been brought up on standards of material success, young couples today often consider material success of relatively small importance as contrasted with working for something of greater social significance. They try to be of service; young fathers carry petitions; young mothers attend lectures on social problems; they teach their children to think in terms of service to humanity. And if the American family, as Phyllis McGinley has put it, "seems threatened-by the impact of violence and war, by frequent divorce, changing sexual attitudes and a general atmosphere of wariness toward established religion-it is also protected by this fresh concern for the rights of human beings." Still, marriage is a highly personal situation, exposing the partners to the most private and intimate of contacts.