How People Marry
By PROFESSOR BARBARA WOOTTON
NOW that we are all getting so highly poll-conscious (I mean the Gallup, not the electoral variety), the risk that the meretricious will be passed off as genuine is quite formidable. Most of us are not yet practised in discrimination. To some, perhaps, Gallupping, listener-research, mass-observa- tions and anybody who claims to have made a social survey are Just a big joke—something new to laugh at along with the odder popularisations of psychiatry ; while others may be inclined to swallow the lot in solemn gulps. But sooner or later we shall have to learn how to tell t'other from which.
Much the best way to do so is to set a standard from a really workmanlike job ; and so much the better if that job is con- cerned with a subject of first-rate importance, in which everybody is interested, and on which knowledge is scanty. An example of such a piece of work lies upon my table in the shape of a careful scientific study * of married life in working-class circles in London carried out a few years ago and recently published. The scope is modest and the sample small-200 couples only. But—and here we note the first marks of good workmanship—the selection was thoughtfully designed, within the harsh limits of what is practicable, so as both to be representative and to throw light Upon the particular problems in which the authors were interested ; and the sampling, along with the statistical operations performed on the data, is exactly described, so that if you want to quarrel with any conclusion you know exactly what you are quarrelling with and exactly how that conclusion was reached. All the, subjects of this study were, of necessity, drawn from the inmates of a military hospital. Half were patients in a neurotic ward and the other half, the control group, had stopped bullets or picked up infections and so forth—a random enough selection in war-time, when the enquiry was carried out. Their civilian occupations were predominantly manual, with a small Sprinkling of white-collar jobs. The men were interviewed at length by Mrs. Woodside, and then, where both spouses agreed, similar interviews took place at home with their wives. The results are fascinating ; and, what is more, they are on the whole encouraging. It is true that, as the authors themselves Point out, the sample is slightly biased in favour of successful 1 marriages, since where there had been real disaster, or a complete breakdown was imminent, interviews would naturally be refused. However, in both the control and the neurotic groups, only 9 per cent. of the marriages were assessed as "positively unhappy" and 6 the control group 45 per cent. were ` positively happy" With another 36 per cent. "satisfactory." As might be expected, amongst the neurotic group positive happiness was much rarer. Such assessments are, of course, necessarily subjective, but the material in the book leaves the impression that the authors did have a pretty shrewd idea of what was really going on in the homes of their subjects. This picture is the more remarkable if seen against the back- ground of the way in which marriages.. come about. After all, for most of us the decision whether and whom we will marry affects our subsequent happiness more than any other single decision that we make between birth and death. But what scant attention it appears to get! First acquaintance is generally made by chance—very often (and this must not be underStoOd in any * Patterns of Marriage. By Eliot Slater and Moya Woodside. (Cassell. 178.6d.). but a respectable sense) in the street—and mild companionable liking is the predominant note of courtships. So far so good. perhaps ; but "the personality of the partner is not seen clear- sightedly " by the prospective spouse, either for itself or in relation to the demands which will be made on his or her own character in the maintenance of a common home and in parent- hood. Twenty-five of the 200 women actually disliked their future husbands at first sight, and in a few cases women had got married in the hope that this would change their husbands "against all natural probabilities."
The general picture is, in fact, one in which young men and women appear to drift into committing themselves to "living together for good" without any conception of what a formidable undertaking this is. " Drift " is the operative word, irrespective of whether there has been sexual relationship before marriage or a baby is already on its way. The Sudden infatuation is untypical ; and, in spite of all the idealisation of romantic love in our social tradition, "love at first sight" is a rare experience.' However, even though the number is too small to be statistically significant, it is nice to know that of the twenty cases which did claim to have begun this way, fourteen were found in the happier half of the total as against six among the less happy.
The factors that make for happiness in marriage are found to be much what one would expect, as, for instance, common interests (but not so much the "union of opposites "), though the standard of expectation is in many cases sadly low, especially amongst the older couples. "He doesn't drink or order me about" on the one side and, on the other, "She's not the nagging sort" are expressions which betray how pitifully little is expected of life. There are, however, some discrepancies between what people believe to be the foundation of married happiness and the factors that are actually present in the more satisfactory marriages. In particular, "children are mentioned first and most often by both sexes" as making for marital harmony, and yet the objective evidence gives no support to the view that fertile unions are happier than childless marriages.
Such a study as this necessarily throws light on much beside the actual marital histories which were its starting-point. It has relevance, for instance, to problems in human genetics, such as the degree to which neurotics tend to inbreed and the size of their families as compared with those of the population at large. Similar enquiries about intelligence have indicated that people of superior intellect tend on the whole to choose one another as mates, and also that the intelligent commonly have relatively, small families—results which in many quarters have created, alarm and despondency, since they seem to suggest that the population as a whole must be getting stupider and stupider, Happily, direct enquiry has, for whatever reason, failed up to now to establish that this is, in fact, the case, so we may con- dude more cheerfully that this particular question is a good deal more complicated than it looked at first sight.
It would, however, be hardly less disturbing if it turned out that neurotics had a comparable predisposition to marry one another, and if they then produced large families. The evidence on this point in Dr. Slater 's and Mrs. Woodside's study is neces-, sarily slight ; but, for what it is worth, it does suggest that, if ono spouse is neurotically inclined, there is a more than average chance that the other will show a similar tendency. But against that we can set the fact that the families of the neurotic group in the enquiry were on the average smaller than those of the controls. In any case, though this point is not emphasised in the book, one must not speak as if neurosis were wholly due to inherited factors. The presence of one neurotic spouse in a family cannot but lay a great strain upon the other, and thiA might well show itself," even in averagely stable people, in symptoms that might be classed as "neurotic." On a wider canvas still these family histories illustrate man of the major social changes, as well as the unsolved soci Frplems, of our time. 1■To One can read the stories of their ow 4filidhood given by the subjects of this study without being struc by the force and the range of the civilising process which ha been at work in the generation that separates today's young working-class married people from their parents. Again and again childhood memories were overshadowed by "poverty, unemployment, drink, overcrowding and uncontrolled fertility." Of these five evils only the fourth has not (in this country) been reduced to a shadft of the terror that it was.
The authors of this study are not complacent. They are troubled by the prevailing lack of any philosophy of life among this typical sample of contemporary Britons ; they noticed—and this was during the war—the "great spiritual -gulf between Government and people" ; they are worried at the occurrence of anti-Semitism amongst men and women who were in general remarkably tolerant ; and they are distressed to see how com- pletely irrelevant to the problems of reality these conscripts and their wives had found their education (but, of course, this was not the education of today's children). One is, however, left with a feeling that, all in all, it is astonishing what people do manage to make of their lives, and that the problems are mostly soluble. "We get a measure of a norm of behaviour, and indica- tions of the potentialities that exist for its improvement, and of the factors that hold it down to a level so much lower than it might be." It is the last seven wordi of that sentence which reveal the sane optimism of this work.
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