We need to make romance a somewhat finer art

Youth will continue to do the mating in America with little regard to the interest or wishes of teachers, parents, guardians, or society. This we may as well take for granted. Mating will be based on romance. But we must temper the romantic impulse in youth, as we do other human impulses, by instilling in their minds ideas that will restrain and guide their emotions. We need to socialize more fully this impulse as we have socialized hunger, for instance. Eating has become sort of a fine art with us as compared to its practice by savages and infants. We control the hunger drive by etiquette and by our notions of the balanced ration and regular meals. The organic drive is still there, but in civilized society we try to act as though it were not there.

We need to make romance a somewhat finer art, to elevate and direct it in the interests of a more permanent family unit and a better race. Parents could do much by building standards by which the youth can guide his selection of a mate, but reforms in custom more often begin in the school than in the home.

Most youngsters acquire a new idea of a desirable mate after going to college. They have a better ideal, and their romantic interest seeks out a type of person different from that selected before this training. College marriages on the whole turn out well. But most young people, even in our enlightened age, never go to college.

Give a young man or woman a course in eugenics and he will have set up new barriers to the free exercise of the romantic urge, for he will invariably check up on the ancestral characteristics of anyone he considers for marriage, to see whether certain weaknesses that are known to be hereditary are likely to be present in the germ plasm. Let him face economic selfresponsibility and he will have set up other barriers. He will not so easily rationalize himself into marrying on short notice with the experience-belied phrase, "Two can live as cheaply as one."

We need to give young people some practical ideas regarding marriage and the family; some standards by which they can evaluate themselves and their companions of the opposite sex with regard to their capacity for marriage and homemaking.

In most fields now we believe in giving experience vicariously through books and through the school curriculum. In this manner we pass on the best that the race has learned and experienced. Yet in the field of marriage and the family we let youth learn by experience. The establishment of a family--the basic institution of any nation--is left almost entirely to chance, as though we had no concern about the marital happiness of youth, to say nothing of the welfare of the next generation.

Perhaps our lethargy is a carry-over from the prudish days when marriage was sacred and sex was taboo. Perhaps it is due to the fact that most teachers are unmarried women whom we would not trust to educate our children for successful marriage. Probably, however, we have no reason, other than that romance is the custom to which we have entrusted this function of life and, having it safely pigeonholed, do not care to disturb it.

We need courses in high school and more courses in college dealing with marriage and the family. Perhaps after having succeeded there we can go into the lower grades. Some of the problems to be dealt with in a high-school course are (1) physical qualities essential to successful marriage, (2) social qualities essential for living together happily in the family, (3) the importance of similar culture heritages, especially in religion and in economic status, (4) personal adjustments needful in family life, (5) the economic responsibilities of the family, (6) the importance of an understanding with regard to the wife's place in the home, and (7) parenthood.Since marriage is society's ceremonial endorsement to a permanent institution, we should teach every youth to ask himself at least the following questions:

1. Do we have the physical and mental traits that guarantee reasonable hereditary equipment to the children we may have?

2. Do we have the emotional stability and ruggedness of character that is necessary to an intimate lifelong partnership?

3. Do we have the ability and training necessary to "keep the wolf from the door"?

4. Do we have culture backgrounds that would assure us. similar ideas on morals, religion, standard of living, and nationality and racial questions?

5. Are we satisfied with each other's families and with the relationships that we are likely to maintain with them after marriage?

6. Do we have similar ideas regarding the place of woman in the family and the desirability of children?

7. Do we have a sufficient number of similar vocational, reactional, and other interests so that we are likely to maintain permanent bonds of companionship?

The screen notion of love at first sight, followed by the passionate kiss, the overpowering urge, the hasty marriage, and the "lived happily ever after," has been too typical of our courtship and marriage conceptions. We may as well admit that such practice does not work so well as it might, and try to draw a more realistic picture of marriage and the family for youth in the schoolroom where we are supposed to have some respect for reality.