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.
