In a sense the conflict between a man and a woman is at its height when they mate. The process of mating, of yielding to attraction, of overcoming repulsion, of working through a series of countervailing forces is the process we now call adjustment. It is at the point when this adjustment reaches a balance that marriage may be said fairly to begin.
The point which is not usually stressed is the fact that there is no single moment at which a balance is struck and when that balance becomes permanent. Though the stress is less than during courtship or early marriage, the process is continuous, varying in tempo and degree, but always present. It is always possible, if the process fails, for love to become hatred; indeed an especially favorable soil for hatred exists where there has been a prior love. Acquaintances do not hate; they merely part. People who have no adjustment to each other, that is, whose personalities are so far apart that the adjustment process never takes place, are too indifferent to each other to excite any violent emotion.
If we do not accept the hypothesis that the relationship of man and woman is a conflict, we may at least concede that the process of marriage, once the strictly physical phase has become subordinate to the intellectual process, involves a continuous balancing of opposite interests, opposite tastes and opposite ideas. This is too often pictured as life in which one or both give up interests which they hold very dear. Indeed, that is sometimes the case; we all know marriages where one has been entirely subjected to the other. Domination may fit the psychological needs of one partner just as slavery may fit the needs of the other and in such a case the arrangement is a satisfactory one for the individuals concerned. But there is always the danger that the slave will rebel. A husband or wife who tries to reduce his partner to complete subjection, who asks him to sacrifice all his heart's desires, must bear in mind that the worm will turn. There is no hatred or resentment more bitter than that of the rebellious slave.
Actually marriage can be and should be an evolution by which each adopts interests which were formerly foreign. The result should be not that each is limited by the other, but that each is expanded by the other. If there is any quality of defeat in this mythical conflict, the conquered should find not that he has lost a province, but that he has become a member of a larger kingdom. This idea has no novelty except as applied to marriage. Certainly every religion in the world has proceeded from the theory that by acknowledging subjection to a spiritual ideal the individual discovered that his life was not narrowed, but enlarged; certainly by giving up some individual idiosyncrasies men have discovered that their range was not limited but increased. In the closest and most intimate relationships the same result can be achieved; and the result of the assumed conflict which has been so often depicted in literature as a bitter and destructive tragedy can, and in fact usually does, become a development increasing the radius of both lives. Each is himself, but more than himself because he has become a part of the other. Gilbert Chesterton once observed that while it may be conceded to mathematicians that two and two make four, a human relationship of one and one makes more nearly a thousand times one--which is why the world in spite of its many and obvious disadvantages will probably always return to monogamy.
While marriage is a social institution, it is also the most personal, intimate, and comprehensive human relationship. It is therefore natural that man should center many of his most important and tenacious dreams around his mate. In the mind of every man and every woman who enters marriage there is usually a pretty complete mental picture of what his wife or her husband "ought" to be like.
This dream picture is for the most part an unconscious one. True, almost anyone would be able to write down some of the qualifications for an ideal partner according to his way of thinking. But that list would include but a small part of his dream picture. The rest is formed of emotional needs and sense impressions, unconscious, unformulated, halfforgotten.
Speaking in simple terms, an individual has behind him the impressions he has formed of his parents' marriage and other marriages he may have observed. From these he has drawn conclusions which lead him to emulate or to despise the examples he has seen. These conclusions might best be called "reactions," which merely means that they are not logically and categorically worked out. A trivial example may serve to illustrate the point.
A friend of mine was telling me that she was experiencing some difficulty in getting her young son, aged six, to help in making his bed. "But," said the little boy, "Daddy doesn't make his own bed. You make it for him." The little boy will forget his remark; when he applies for a marriage license at the age of twenty-five, he will not be saying to himself, "I expect my wife to make my bed for me." But somewhere in the back of his mind he can see his mother making his father's bed; that, along with myriad other impressions, goes to make his mental picture of what he expects a wife to do. The illustration is here used only to make clear that the pattern of our dreams is made up of thousands of unconsidered trifles like this.
This pattern of our expectations and of our needs, like marriage itself, is many-sided. It is concerned with what the man and woman shall wear, what they shall eat, the kind of house they shall live in, the kind of friends they shall have, what they shall spend their money on, what is man's work, what is woman's work, how they shall bring up their children. Above all, it is concerned with what part each shall play in loving, supporting, comforting, or hating the other through the great and small fears, failures, successes, irritations, satisfactions, tragedies, and joys of life.
When two people marry, they bring their dreams with them. Marriage involves the meeting of two dreams with a state of facts. Matching the dream with dream, and both with the realities, is the essence of adjustment. This is a continuous process; it begins with courtship; it continues through marriage; it is not ended even by divorce. Our parents meant something very like it when they spoke of the necessity of give and take in marriage, although they assumed a set of principles governing that give and take which today are not always accepted.
It would be absurd to pretend that anyone knows much about the process. The cardinal fact that we have vastly increased our knowledge of the physical development of man is matched by the equally important fact that our knowledge of his mental, psychological, and spiritual functioning is hazy in the extreme. But we do have some information, collected from realms as diverse as anthropology and poetry, history and biology. From these we can, at least, make certain hypotheses--sophisticated guesses, if you choose, as to this process of adjustment.
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