Mental health- SEXUAL ADJUSTMENT IN MARRIAGE

SEXUAL ADJUSTMENT IN MARRIAGE

DESPITE MARRIAGE manuals, the Kinsey and other reports, and the so called sexual revolution, medical authorities estimate that at least half of all married couples today still suffer from serious sexual problems. How unfortunate it is that the sex act, with its potential of deep and rewarding intimacy, should be clouded by fear, shame, ignorance, and misconceptions. Perhaps some sexual anthropologist of a future century, upon analyzing the Pill, the drive-in, the works of some of our best-selling novelists, the Tween Bra, and all the myriad other artifacts of the Great Sexual Revolution, will conclude that ours may have been an era in which there was some change in morality but not necessarily in sexual enlightenment and fulfillment.

Parents may think that young people today know as much as, if not more than, they should about sex; and many young people may smile in superior manner at any notion that they need education in such matters. Yet from the questions still asked by newly married couples, as well as by long-married ones, physicians are aware that much ignorance and misinformation remain. Both young and old couples often ask whether their sexual relations are" all right." They would like to have the boundaries of normal relationships defined, and they are concerned with problems of frigidity and impotence. It is a good thing that questions is being asked, that hopefully fewer couples refuse to discuss sex matters.

Yet there remain many people who believe that to put any significant emphasis on sex education is a mistake. They muster many arguments, even such as the one of a young married woman who declared: "I'm sorry Bill and I ever read that book about sex in marriage. It just made him feel guilty because he can't live up to what it says a man should do to satisfy. It is true that some books dealing with sex education have been written in a way that tends to remove all spontaneity from the relationship. Because matters of sex technique and skill were so, some writers have gone to the other extreme, exaggerating their importance and neglecting other aspects.

Yet physical attraction and intuition are not enough to enable people to solve the problems that may give rise to, or result from, an unsatisfactory sexual relationship. Neither rules nor elaborate detailing of techniques can solve such problems; only a better understanding of sex in all its aspects may do that. 

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.