Marriage for love or marriage of convenience.
Falling in love is the expected and proper prelude to marriage. This means first of all that you marry for love and that you work at it after marriage. Marriage is the final realization of a romantic attraction.
Getting married is primarily a romantic adventure with little prudent weighing of factors important for a lifelong union. Passionate attachment and anticipated happiness outweigh such considerations as cultural similarities and common social experience. We proudly declare that we no longer marry for convenience to promote a career or to please our families but to establish a desirable union that is voluntary and rests on personal choice.
Romance is beautiful. Wonderful. But is it the primary basis for selection of matrimonial mates on which to build a lifelong union? Many things must be considered. Young people need the counsel of their elders. Much as parental control is criticised in modern society, there are some things that can be said for it. Parents do know something about the nature and needs of their own children. They can judge their mate through the eyes of their greater age and experience. And they also seek the happiness of their children.
Does modern research throw any light on romance as the basis for mate selection? Romance, according to some researchers, is a process of fantasy formation when one idealizes another person ignoring the faults and magnifying the virtues of the loved one. After marriage there is usually a return to reality.
Studies of marital failure and success show quite clearly that marriage based on romantic attraction does not turn out as well as marriage based upon more comradely affection.
Supporting this conclusion are the other studies showing that the longer the period of acquaintance before marriage, the greater are the chances of marital success.
Perhaps most essential is the importance of similarity of social background for marital success.
This means that like should marry like. “Marriage, – writes a well-known family sociologist, - involves living with a person, not merely loving him”. It is this prosaic fact that places romantic love in its proper proportions as a basis for marriage. Romance must be termed the prelude to the more sober and realistic consideration of a mate, but romance alone is not enough.
Moreover when we decide to get married we will look for a partner with certain qualities. These qualities are Chastity, perfect modesty in word, deed, and even thought. They are so essential that without it no female is fit to be a wife. It is not enough that a young woman should abstain from anything approaching boldness in her behaviour towards men; it is not enough that she casts down her eyes, or turns aside her head with a smile, when she hears an indelicate allusion: she ought to appear not to understand it, and to receive from it no more impression than if she were a post. A loose woman is a .disagreeable acquaintance: what must she be then, as a wife? Your free and hearty girls I have liked very much to talk and laugh with; but never, for one moment, did it enter my mind that I could have endured a free and hearty girl for a wife. A wife, I repeat, is to last for life, she is to be a counterbalance to troubles and misfortune, and therefore must be perfect.
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Sobriety. By the word sobriety in a young woman I mean a great deal more than a rigid abstinence from the love of drink; I mean sobriety of conduct. The word ‘sober’ does not confine itself to matters of drink: it expresses steadiness, seriousness, carefulness, scrupulous propriety of conduct. Now sobriety is a great qualification in the person you mean to make your wife. Playful, frivolous, careless girls are very amusing, and they may become sober, but you have not certainty of this. To be sure, when girls are mere children they should play and romp like children, but when they arrive at that age when they begin to think of managing a house, then it is time for them to cast away the levity of the child.
If any young man imagines that this sobriety of conduct in young women must be accompanied by seriousness approaching gloom, he is, according to my experience, very much deceived. The contrary is the fact; for I have found that gay and laughing women are the most insipid of souls and are generally down in the dumps. A greater curse than a wife of this description would be somewhat difficult to find. I hate a dull, melancholy thing; I could not have existed in the same house with such a thing for a single month. Whereas a sober woman is underneath joyful and contented.
Industry. By industry, I do not mean merely labour or activity of the body, for purposes of gain or of saving; for there may be industry amongst those who have more money than they know what to do with. Industry in the wife is always necessary to the happiness and prosperity of the family. If she is lazy then the children will be lazy; everything, however urgent, will be put off to the last moment, then it will be done badly, and in many cases, not at all: the dinner will be late, the journey or visit will be delayed; inconveniences of all sorts will be continually arising, there will always be a heavy arrear of things unperformed; and therefore a lazy woman must always be a curse.
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Finally beauty ... the last in point of importance. But the great use of female beauty, the great practical advantage of it, is that it naturally and unavoidably tends to keep the husband in a good humour with himself, to make him pleased with his bargain. Beauty is, in some degree, a matter of taste, what one man admires, another does not; and it is fortunate for us that it is so. But still there are certain things that all men admire; and a husband is always pleased when he perceives that a portion, at least, of these things are in his own possession. He takes his possession as a compliment to himself: there must have been, he thinks, some charm, seen or unseen, to have caused him to be blessed with such an acquisition.
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