CHAPTER XI
WHY MARRIAGES ARE FAILURES
Marriages are often failures because one or both parties think of it as lust sanctioned by law.
People considering marriage often know little and care less for harmony of minds and ideals.
People often, as we have seen, enter into marriage with such different social, racial or religious backgrounds that complete adjustment is practically impossible.
Marriages are often failures because there is an unwillingness on the part of one or the other, or of both, to adjust one's self to the conditions. It always takes a great deal of unselfish love to make a marriage a success.
Marriage often shocks a young girl beyond words, due to the fact that she does not know what it involves. Its intimacy is unimagined. Some will never get over the shock that comes from ignorance.
Therefore education for marriage is indispensable, and those who instruct girls and young women should be pureminded, highminded, having a holy idea of the relationship, and seeing no evil in bodily contact.
A pure and holy love on the part of both man and woman will uplift it and make it heavenly. Young women should be taught that marriage is essentially chaste and holy, and is actually the highest and noblest of relationships in all the world.
Impure minds have made it evil. Pure minds have been taught that it was not in itself chaste. St. Paul is responsible for giving the world a totally wrong concept of its high character. A married woman is as chaste and pure as any virgin. St. Paul was carried away in his denunciations by the terrible evils of a dying world, so that he temporarily wrote of it unwisely. But he later saw that typified by Christ and the Church it was holy and beautiful and heavenly.
Marriage is often a failure because it is entered into merely from sex-urge, or from parental insistence, or from family or financial considerations, and sometimes it is a failure because it is entered into from an idealism which has not been instructed as to its exact nature.
Marriages are often failures because people are selfish, as already suggested, or cruel, or domineering, or set in their ways, or lazy, or have disagreeable personal habits, or are unclean in body or mind. It is necessary for both men and women to see if these qualities exist in the one they have in mind as a possible mate.
Marriage may be a failure because a man is fickle, and sometimes because the woman is fickle.
We have already suggested that men sometimes marry a pretty face fancying it has character behind it. And sometimes women marry a man for his looks, or his masterful way. And dearly do they pay.
Too often women marry a man to reform him, and they practically never suceed. Unhappiness is almost certain.
Marriages are often failures because men neglect their wives when hard labor and child-bearing make them unattractive.
Marriages disappoint sometimes because selfish women resent children, or because selfish men resent them because of the curtailment of their comfort and freedom.
Marriages are often failures because people marry in haste. Time is an indispensable factor to investigate one's feelings and the character of the proposed mate. The provision by many states of the American Union to postpone marriages for a certain time after the license is granted is eminently wise. It prevents very many unhappy marriages. The contracting parties need always to take plenty of time before plunging into such an intimate and lasting relationship.