Is MARRIAGE on the way out?
Is adultery still wrong?
Many authorities are beginning to question whether marriage is now becoming an outmoded custom.
What's happened to the time-honored institution that has been called sacred and holy?
SHOCKING PREDICTIONS are being voiced by psychologists and other professional people. "Are we," asks The Observer, London, "the last married generation?"
British psychologist James Heming, in Marriage Guidance, official organ of Britain's Marriage Guidance Council, predicts engagement rings are doomed, and weddings will be rituals of the past. A mass-circulation London paper publishes a series, beginning under a screaming two-page headline: "Is MARRIAGE OUT OF DATE?"
What's Happening?
Anyone making such predictions a few decades ago would have been considered crazy — or idiotic. Even now, such statements are shocking.
Until the last decade or two, marriage was the long-established taken-for-granted custom. To question it would have been unthinkable. Of course a very few remained unmarried. But for people as a whole it was one of the three great events of life — birth, marriage, death. Young men and women approaching adulthood looked forward naturally to marrying, as normally as breathing air. What girl wanted to become an "old maid"?
WHAT'S HAPPENED?
The changes that led to it didn't happen in a 50-day period. It has developed in a surprisingly short fifty years! But moral concepts and standards have changed so gradually and steadily during that half century that people generally were hardly aware of what was happening. And conditions during these years have been punctuated by the jarring effect of two world wars, a prolonged "cold war," emergence through the machine age, the atomic age, the jet age — and now, the space age!
Society has taken all this in stride, unshocked, undismayed. And no one today seems conscious of just how staggering is this moral collapse into what is deceptively labeled the "new morality." It is as if society has been anesthetized into unquestioning acceptance of a degenerated attitude toward sex and marriage that would have been shockingly revolting, had it been introduced suddenly.
When I was married, in 1917, the marriage was "until death do us part." Chastity was still the demanded ethic of society. Any girl who gave in to permarital sex had "lost her honor." She was "damaged goods."
Parents followed the tradition of "keep our children innocent and pure through ignorance until marriage —and then," they supposed, "instinct will teach them what to do." But instinct did not teach them. Humans did not come equipped with instinct. Humans must be taught. But they were not taught. Their parents had not been taught, and probably were bungling their marriage. And besides, even had the parents known what to teach their children, it would have been too embarrassing. Sex was supposed to be shameful, if not positively sinful.
When we were married, my young wife and I sought in vain to purchase a book that would provide technical instruction in sex, pregnancy and childbirth. But it was illegal, then, to publish, sell and distribute printed instruction in the area of sex and marriage.
The Floodgates Open
After World War I the legal bars were removed, and morals toppled also. The floodgates opened to an avalanche of sex literature. Gradually the prudish morality relaxed, and society became inoculated by the immoral "new morality."
Something was criminally wrong with this tidal wave of sex literature. It revealed only half of the vitally needed knowledge — the physical, biological half. And even that from a materialistic sensual approach. The "authorities" who produced this new flood of sex instruction were themselves ignorant of the true meaning and PURPOSES of sex and of MARRIAGE!
Actually, this whole toboggan-slide of morals probably was triggered by Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis. Freud attributed neuroses and many nervous and mental disorders to sexual repression and ignorance. The old morality that had come through the Middle Ages regarded sex as shameful, degrading and sinful. Not merely the wrong use outside of marriage — but the human body itself was suspect.
Of course reproduction in marriage had to be tolerated. But, the chaste "fathers" of second and third century "Christianity" wondered, why couldn't the Creator have thought out a more decent and less shameful way to preserve the human race?
So the western world had sex repression. Wives, kept ignorant of proper sex knowledge, often were virtually raped by their equally uninstructed husbands. In angry frustration, husbands accused wives of selfish frigidity. Wives by the millions suffered a sense of guilt when forced to give in to their husbands, and labeled all men "brutes." Of course the husbands were not brutes. They were merely ignorant.
This repression and ignorance rendered about nine in ten marriages unhappy. Divorce seldom resulted, due to religious convictions and the economic dependency of wives on their husbands.
So Freud attributed the neuroses, and nervous and mental disturbances, to this sexual repression and ignorance. His idea of a solution was to reverse the definition of sex. Since the "sex is sinful" attitude caused all the troubles, why not reverse the definition, and call sex GOOD? — any use of sex, in or out of marriage! If repression, self-denial and ignorance caused neurotic disquiet, reasoned Freud and his followers, let's emancipate the people from restraints — create a "NEW morality," and educate the people in sex knowledge.
So, in a one-generation plunge, civilization in our world has swung to the opposite extreme of the moral pendulum. Premarital sexual experience is no longer being discouraged. Modern teenage girls are being "emancipated" from the old taboos.
Nothing is more needed, today, than a VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS to speak out against this sudden moral collapse, and enlighten the world with the MISSING HALF of the knowledge about sex and marriage. The world has been given the physical and biological half. But it has come from a materialistic viewpoint, IGNORANT of the real MEANING and PURPOSE of sex and of MARRIAGE!
Neither the old repressive morality nor the so-called "new" — which is cesspool immorality — is the TRUE morality. The TRUE morality will bring happiness, joys and blessings! The world seriously needs the true knowledge that no author, until now, has made available. They need, not only the physical and technical details about sex. They need, also, a knowledge of the PURPOSES of sex — and of MARRIAGE!
But, being ignorant of these PURPOSES - and of right USES that would bring rich blessings, joys and delights — the psychologists now are questioning even the time-honored sacred institution of MARRIAGE!
If Freud, his colleagues and immediate followers, questioned the desirability of marriage as a universally accepted institution, they precipitated no public crusade for its abolition. It is only now that psychologists are breaking into print with their astonishing predictions about marriage becoming obsolete. This questioning of the desirability and continuance of the marriage institution is merely the natural result of the radically changed concept and conduct in morals.
The Freudian "enlightenment" started the toboggan-slide in morals. This drift of immorality has accelerated until the current moral collapse is staggering almost beyond belief. It is fast becoming a greater threat to the survival of civilization than the hydrogen bomb.
Concurrent with this new promiscuity in immorality is another phenomenon. Women are deserting the wifely and motherly profession of homemaking. They are becoming salary and wage-earners, and gaining financial independence. I have mentioned two reasons why, until forty or fifty years ago, few unhappy marriages were terminated by divorce: religious convictions, and the economic dependency of wives. But religious restraints have relaxed, and wives are becoming self-sufficient.