If the sexes were evenly distributed and everyone married on his own level, there would still be the problem of proper mating. Who should marry whom? Let those who have already committed themselves not be disturbed by this question. A scientifically ideal choice of mate is not essential to marital happiness. There is also a scale of values which says: "The highest achievement is to make a success with her whom you have already chosen." This achievement also is facilitated by science and understanding.
Most advice to young people about choosing a mate seems to imply that there are a number of bad types of personality which all should avoid. Indeed it is quite true, as the experience of case workers and marriage counselors will testify, that many persons are psychologically unfit to marry anyone. The significant question is: how numerous are these bad risks? If they are less than 10 or 15 per cent of the population, perhaps we can persuade them to stay unmarried. If, however, they are 50 per cent, as one might suspect from the numerous and broad descriptions sometimes given, then most of them will marry anyway. If we steer one person away from such a black sheep the latter merely falls into someone else's arms. Are we not merely helping one person at the expense of another? How does it profit society as a whole?
This analysis, of course, is too abstract and there are not the facts to answer concretely the question raised. It was raised to call attention to our basic assumptions in this discussion. Do you as an individual merely want help to get an advantage over some other individual, or will you help to increase the general welfare and happiness of the whole? About the possibility of increasing the general welfare, thinkers are today becoming more rather than less optimistic. Moreover, many of your individual problems can best be solved, not by something you can do single-handed for yourself, but by the joint efforts of groups in which you coöperate. If you are able to accept this social responsibility, you will want to discuss this process of courtship and marital choice from a social point of view which will be independent of your own present personal status in the process.
According to the romantic theory there is something mysterious about the process of pairing off. It is more or less believed that each person has a "natural mate," and when this mate is found, the couple will know intuitively that they "belong to each other." Calculations and cold-blooded analysis, it is thought, do not help; they may spoil the beauty of romance. Here is where understanding is needed. True understanding will not spoil the romance; it may save one from disillusionment afterward.
Love, or any other emotional experience, consists of two parts. First, there is the feeling itself; second, there is the object of the feeling. In the case of romantic love, the object is a particular human being of the opposite sex. John says he is romantically in love with Mary. If he says so, he probably is. Except under very abnormal conditions, he is the best judge of his own feelings. There is nothing false, or unreal, or illusory about that feeling of his. It is there. Neither is there any question about Mary's being the object of his feeling. Furthermore, John, throughout his life, will probably experience now and then the same love feeling that he does now. These feelings are as possible and real at fifty as at twenty; they do not wear out in a few years like a suit of clothes. Moreover, Mary will probably always be much the same type of person as she is now; she will change only gradually. If she is lovable by John now, she will probably be lovable by him in the future, and is lovable also by many other men. In all these respects John is under no illusion. Both his feeling, and the object of his feeling, are very real, and they are substantially what they seem to be. If John is an average young American, however, mentally nourished upon popular love literature and movies, and has not had scientific training, he is likely to suffer from illusion in one respect. Namely, he will believe that there is something inevitable, changeless, unique, and irreplaceable, about this connection of his love feeling with the object, "Mary."
Yet, in sober truth, while she indeed may be the "only girl" for him under present conditions, she is not the only possible girl; she was not so in the past, and she may not be in the future. Maybe John will admit these facts in certain moods, but to admit them gives him a sense of disloyalty and disillusion. He would rather cherish his illusion! If he becomes disillusioned he may become cynical, that is, he will try to lay aside his more "idealistic" feelings and to live upon a lower level of pleasures and emotions which are less subject to disappointment.
I would like to inoculate all young people against illusion, disillusion, and cynicism. The essential element in my mental antitoxin would be an appreciation of change. We have been taught to overvalue what is static. We crave that which "stays put," the rock amid shifting sands. Yet the fact is, all things change. John changes. Mary changes. Their love relation changes. Probably John now likes many foods which he formerly disliked intensely. He may feel enthusiastic about certain sports, men friends, political theories toward which he formerly felt indifference or dislike. Toward other objects his feeling has shifted in the reverse direction. It is natural that similar shifts should take place in his love feelings.
Yet all these facts do not destroy: (1) the possibility of this love relation's being supremely valuable, indeed the most beautiful experience in the life of John or Mary, whether it endures for a long or short while; (2) the possibility of maintaining this love relation, if they so wish, at a high intensity throughout life. If they wish to maintain it, however, they must not think of it as something inherently static, which will endure forever because of some mysterious inner quality, but as something which is now so beautiful that it is worth continued development through careful, intelligent nurture. A supreme love relation between John and Mary may continue throughout life, but it will not be changeless. What they really want and can get is continuity, not changelessness. They can get continuity by accepting change!
The writer's generation was taught: "Put thy faith in that which endureth." Then they were disillusioned. Some turned cynical and said: "Nothing endureth, hence ideals are vain, and only sense pleasures are worth cultivating." A few, however, have seen beyond this. As they see it, "everything changeth, hence let us rejoice. Life itself is change."
With this dynamic concept of life, of personality, and of love, the younger generation may face the future without illusion and also without cynicism. Everything changes, that is, in its specific configuration and constitution. But any aspect of life which seems worth continuing, can be continued if one will accept the changes which are necessary to continue it. Thus the seeming paradox, that the only way to secure permanence in life is through change. In the case of the love relation, the meaning is this. If John wishes always to love Mary as intensely as he does now, and she him, they must perpetually renew their love by learning new things, doing new things, changing their treatment of each other as new needs and circumstances arise. In other words, they must continually change themselves and their relation to each other to keep in step with the other changes which life will continually and relentlessly force upon them. To put the matter in more philosophical terms, the only kind of permanence in human relations is a dynamic equilibrium maintained by keeping related changes constantly adjusted to one another in their speed and direction. This is better named "continuity" than "permanence." Why should this make anyone melancholy?
To choose a mate intelligently does not mean to choose unromantically. Few if any persons marry without emotion, without love, which sooner or later takes on a "romantic" quality. The issue is simply whether one will use his intelligence to guide love, or place himself at the mercy of circumstances. To be sure, one cannot directly, through mere will power, make himself fall in love or out of love with a given person. He can, however, by will power, keep himself out of situations which may cause his present mild interest in a potential but unsuitable partner to develop into romance. He can by will power put himself into situations which promise new and desirable acquaintances. He can hold a budding romantic feeling in check until intelligence, so to speak, gives him the green light, and then advance joyously. When that time comes, he will not find that his love emotions have been dulled or impoverished because on certain earlier occasions they were held under control.
The reason for many mismatings is that the partners fall in love because of one or two highly desired traits and overlook the remainders of each other's personality. Thus a young woman was in love with A, but was obliged to break with him because of certain abnormalities in his personality, including a pathological tendency toward fits of gloom and depression. Soon afterward she met B, who emotionally was the very opposite of A: light-hearted, frivolous, always eager for a good time. On the rebound from her earlier disappointment she fell in love with this second man and married him. Years later she found that she had made a mistake. What she really wanted in the long run was a much "deeper" person than B; she wanted someone like A without A's pathological tendencies. But the reaction against the frustration of her first love caused her to overvalue, for some time, the one trait which had been lacking in that person. During this period of emotionally warped judgment, she made her mistake.
There are other causes beside disappointments in previous love which lead one to overvalue a particular trait in a potential partner while being blind to the more important remainder of his or her personality. It may be some ideal or whim developed years ago and never yet satisfied. Suddenly one discovers "just what I've been seeking all these years," and one's emotions surge up into a mighty wave which sweeps all before it.
One woman had had several men friends who were devoted to her. More than one had asked to marry her and she admitted they would make ideal husbands. Yet she couldn't "fall in love" with these men. To get that romantic feeling, to be carried away by her emotions, she needed a man having certain specific characteristics of manner and attitude: he must be gay, free from apparent seriousness or anxiety, and sophisticated. Once she found her man and was overwhelmed emotionally. But she couldn't accept other aspects of his personality; the two put each other to certain tests, the tests failed and they parted.
A young man working toward a career in science was weary of the smug conventionality which characterized most of the girls with whom he had been so far associated. He craved a girl who was "intellectual" and could share his joy of emancipation from his small-town conservative past. He found such a girl and married her. Then he discovered that she had only a few traits out of several which he needed. She could share with him a brilliant conversation and some groups of friends, but not his chief leisure interests, which required a more or less rural, home-and-fireside type of living, with certain manual skills and crafts. He had given up only certain of the values derived from his background culture; others which he retained were vital to his happiness. The woman likewise found that she did not possess quite the kind of husband she had anticipated. The interests of the partners were not only different, but mutually interfering, because they called for very different places and styles of living. They struggled hard to maintain their marriage, but the progressively deepening conflict was too much for them.
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