Marriage & Happiness

In the 1920s, domestic court judges and psychiatrists were popular U. S. oracles on marriage. Their pronouncements usually were guesses, often contradicted each other. While some commentators, for example, said adultery was the chief cause of divorce, others contended it was poverty, low mentality, drink, nagging. Gynecologist T. H. Van de Velde spurned such simple explanations, went so far as to assert that mating should be between "a cyclothymic pycnic woman and a schizothymeleptosome man."/-

In the 1930s, these oracles have been supplanted by a new group--educators and psychologists, who try to eliminate emotional attitudes toward the problem and express numerically the chances that a particular couple will be happy if they marry. For this purpose they question a large number of married couples in an effort to determine statistically how happy they are, what kind of personalities and opinions they have, how they have been brought up. These investigators then calculate correlations between particular personality traits and happiness. One of their most notable pronouncements is that people who like comic strips are happy in marriage more often than those who do not. From a number of items such as this, psychologists make a test with which to rate an individual's or a couple's chance for happiness.

One of the most important investigations in this field was made in Illinois by University of Chicago's Professors Ernest Watson Burgess and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr. (TIME, Feb. 7). Last week a far more searching study* was completed by Stanford University's famed Psychologist Lewis Madison Terman (intelligence tests). Professor Terman and his staff examined 792 middle-class couples (average income: $2,450) in California. He asked them hundreds of questions, took elaborate precautions to preserve their anonymity so they would answer truthfully. Biggest news in his report is a finding that satisfactory sexual mating is not the prime requirement for marital happiness. Highlights:

> Most important background factor in an individual's chances for a happy marriage is the happiness of his parents. Other favorable auguries: having had a happy childhood, having had firm but not harsh early home discipline, having had little conflict with his parents and strong attachment to them, having had parents who were frank about sex.

> There is no evidence that a couple's income, religious training or differences in age or education affects its marital happiness. Contrary to the findings of other experts, early marriage, brief acquaintance before marriage, petting in adolescence, inadequate sex instruction, have little effect on marital happiness. But relative mental ability counts: a bright husband is likely to be unhappy with a stupid wife; a wife is happy if her husband is superior, unhappy if he is inferior.

> A happy temperament makes for a successful marriage. Most unhappy spouses are temperamentally grouchy, belligerent, critical, rebellious,,unconventional, domineering, moody. Methodical, conservative, emotionally stable spouses tend to be happy. To a surprising degree the happiness of one spouse is independent of the other's.

>One of the most serious causes of marital unhappiness, although husbands rarely complain of it, is a wife's slovenly appearance.

> Fewer than one-third of women born since 1910 and only one-eighth of men were without sex experience at marriage, compared to nearly nine-tenths of the women and one-half the men born before 1890. If this trend continues at the same rate virginity at marriage will approach the vanishing point in about 20 years. Virginal couples have slightly higher chances for a happy marriage than others.

> Most important sex factors in marriage (but less important than personality and background factors) are the relative strength of a husband's and wife's sex drive and ability of a wife to experience sexual satisfaction. But many marriages in which other psychological adjustments are satisfactory rank in the highest category of happiness despite the wife's failure in the latter respect. One wife in three rarely or never reaches such enjoyment. Only one in five always does so. This failure causes the husband unhappiness almost as often as the wife. If this failure is not overcome in the first year of marriage, it is unlikely ever to be. Its causes are probably biological rather than psychological.

Professor Terman admits that his findings are merely straws in the wind, by no means conclusive. Much of his evidence is colored by his subjects' feelings and reticence. Moreover, he points out that findings might differ in other States than California, other groups than the middle class. But he holds that his test for predicting marital happiness has this much reliability: if an individual scores in the top quarter on the test, the chances are four out of five that his marriage will be average or above average in happiness.

/- Rough English translation: a stocky, extrovert woman and a slender introvert man. * PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS IN MARITAL HAPPINESS--McGraw-Hill Book Co. ($4).

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