We shall never know to what extent marriages bring happiness until marriage becomes as free as friendship, at least in the period of trial before children are born, so that we may be sure that no extraneous influences hold couples together. In the meantime we shall have to content ourselves with a good deal of guess-work. But an exact determination of the proportion of successful and unsuccessful marriages is not essential to the present discussion. Regardless of how much disagreement there may be as to the proportion of marriages that are successful enough to be worth preserving, it will be fairly easy to obtain agreement on the proposition that very few of even the “successful” marriages involve an ideal companionship, but rather that most of them represent a sort of modus vivendi—a way of getting along in spite of certain incompatibilities. In fact, only the uninitiated, adolescent romanticist expects anything else out of marriage.
Now, quite to the contrary of what might be expected from the preceding pessimistic remarks, we are going to take sides with the naive adolescent. He is right in what he expects, and society is wrong in not fulfilling his expectations. It is true that the institution of marriage is highly unsatisfactory today, but there are definite reasons for its being so, and by the same token it will be possible for us to remove the causes of its failure if we are willing to face the facts and all their implications.
*108\275\8*
