The Marriage Institution

83:7.1In the early evo­lu­tion of the mar­i­tal mores, mar­riage was a loose union which could be ter­mi­nated at will, and the chil­dren al­ways fol­lowed the mother; the mother-child bond is in­stinc­tive and has func­tioned re­gard­less of the de­vel­op­men­tal stage of the mores.

83:7.2Among prim­i­tive peo­ples only about one half the mar­riages proved sat­is­fac­tory. The most fre­quent cause for sep­a­ra­tion was bar­ren­ness, which was al­ways blamed on the wife; and child­less wives were be­lieved to be­come snakes in the spirit world. Un­der the more prim­i­tive mores, di­vorce was had at the op­tion of the man alone, and these stan­dards have per­sisted to the twen­ti­eth cen­tury among some peo­ples.

83:7.3As the mores evolved, cer­tain tribes de­vel­oped two forms of mar­riage: the or­di­nary, which per­mit­ted di­vorce, and the priest mar­riage, which did not al­low for sep­a­ra­tion. The in­au­gu­ra­tion of wife pur­chase and wife dowry, by in­tro­duc­ing a prop­erty penalty for mar­riage fail­ure, did much to lessen sep­a­ra­tion. And, in­deed, many mod­ern unions are sta­bi­lized by this an­cient prop­erty fac­tor.

83:7.4The so­cial pres­sure of com­mu­nity stand­ing and prop­erty priv­i­leges has al­ways been po­tent in the main­te­nance of the mar­riage taboos and mores. Down through the ages mar­riage has made steady prog­ress and stands on ad­vanced ground in the mod­ern world, not­with­stand­ing that it is threat­en­ingly as­sailed by wide­spread dis­sat­is­fac­tion among those peo­ples where in­di­vid­ual choice—a new lib­erty—fig­ures most largely. While these up­heavals of ad­just­ment ap­pear among the more pro­gres­sive races as a re­sult of sud­denly ac­cel­er­ated so­cial evo­lu­tion, among the less ad­vanced peo­ples mar­riage con­tin­ues to thrive and slowly im­prove un­der the guid­ance of the older mores.

83:7.5The new and sud­den sub­sti­tu­tion of the more ideal but ex­tremely in­di­vid­u­al­is­tic love mo­tive in mar­riage for the older and long-es­tab­lished prop­erty mo­tive, has un­avoid­ably caused the mar­riage in­sti­tu­tion to be­come tem­porar­ily un­sta­ble. Man’s mar­riage mo­tives have al­ways far tran­scended ac­tual mar­riage morals, and in the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies the Oc­ci­den­tal ideal of mar­riage has sud­denly far out­run the self-cen­tered and but par­tially con­trolled sex im­pulses of the races. The pres­ence of large num­bers of un­mar­ried per­sons in any so­ci­ety in­di­cates the tem­po­rary break­down or the tran­si­tion of the mores.

83:7.6The real test of mar­riage, all down through the ages, has been that con­tin­u­ous in­ti­macy which is in­es­cap­able in all fam­ily life. Two pam­pered and spoiled youths, ed­u­cated to ex­pect ev­ery in­dul­gence and full grat­i­fi­ca­tion of van­ity and ego, can hardly hope to make a great suc­cess of mar­riage and home build­ing—a life­long part­ner­ship of self-ef­face­ment, com­pro­mise, de­vo­tion, and un­selfish ded­i­ca­tion to child cul­ture.

83:7.7The high de­gree of imag­i­na­tion and fan­tas­tic ro­mance en­ter­ing into court­ship is largely re­spon­si­ble for the in­creas­ing di­vorce ten­den­cies among mod­ern Oc­ci­den­tal peo­ples, all of which is fur­ther com­pli­cated by woman’s greater per­sonal free­dom and in­creased eco­nomic lib­erty. Easy di­vorce, when the re­sult of lack of self-con­trol or fail­ure of nor­mal per­son­al­ity ad­just­ment, only leads di­rectly back to those crude so­ci­etal stages from which man has emerged so re­cently and as the re­sult of so much per­sonal an­guish and racial suf­fer­ing.

83:7.8But just so long as so­ci­ety fails to prop­erly ed­u­cate chil­dren and youths, so long as the so­cial or­der fails to pro­vide ad­e­quate pre­mar­i­tal train­ing, and so long as un­wise and im­ma­ture youth­ful ide­al­ism is to be the ar­biter of the en­trance upon mar­riage, just so long will di­vorce re­main preva­lent. And in so far as the so­cial group falls short of pro­vid­ing mar­riage prepa­ra­tion for youths, to that ex­tent must di­vorce func­tion as the so­cial safety valve which pre­vents still worse sit­u­a­tions dur­ing the ages of the rapid growth of the evolv­ing mores.

83:7.9The an­cients seem to have re­garded mar­riage just about as se­ri­ously as some pres­ent-day peo­ple do. And it does not ap­pear that many of the hasty and un­suc­cess­ful mar­riages of mod­ern times are much of an im­prove­ment over the an­cient prac­tices of qual­i­fy­ing young men and women for mat­ing. The great in­con­sis­tency of mod­ern so­ci­ety is to ex­alt love and to ide­al­ize mar­riage while dis­ap­prov­ing of the fullest ex­am­i­na­tion of both.