2. Contributory Factors in Marital Disorders

Marriage has been described as the most intimate, delicate and far-reaching relationship between people; and the family as a living, growing, and self-reproducing organism in a two-way relationship with the total environment: physical, cultural, social and spiritual. Human nature and human feelings being what they are there will inevitably be tensions and conflicts in marriage and family life. Successful marriage is not measured by the absence of conflict but by the ability of the partners to find constructive and rational ways of dealing with their conflicts, and growing to greater maturity and harmony to­gether through these experiences.

When there is difficulty in dealing with marital conflicts to the extent that the marital relationship becomes progressively disturbed, it is inevitable that the results will extend beyond the two people involved. Apart from the effects of such dis­order on the health, happiness and efficiency of the partners, which are important to society as well as to themselves, there will inevitably be adverse effects on the health and the de­velopment of the children, and these may soon become irreversible.

If marriage counselors and educators are to be of adequate help to people in marital conflict it is necessary for them to have some over-all concepts of the many inter-related contrib­utory factors in marital disorders, so that they can have some familiarity with the terrain into which they are likely to be led.

For clarity of description it is helpful to think of the most common contributory factors under three headings, the intra-personal, the inter-personal, and the environmental. The intra-personal factors will include those which are concerned with the personalities of the two partners and their fitness in various ways for the stresses and strains of marriage and family life. The inter-personal factors are concerned with the living dynamic relationships between them, and their ways of dealing with tensions and conflicts. The environmental factors are concerned with the influence of the physical, cultural, social and spiritual realities—and unrealities—which bear on the two partners and on their marriage and their family life.

It is quite obvious that defects within the personalities of one or both of the partners will bring about disturbances in their relationships and also in their environment. Disturbances in their relationships will also have some effect, sometimes a profound effect, on their inner personalities and on their environment. And environmental pressures may be serious enough to disturb both their inner personalities and their re­lationships.

It is generally unnecessary for the counselor to disentangle the relative influences of these three sets of factors to any detail—indeed, it would generally be impossible to do so in any case. But if he is aware of the general nature and extent of these three groups of factors and of the kind of influences they can exert on marriage and family living, he is less likely to overlook or disregard them when seeking to understand the feelings and attitudes of the people who come for his help.

I. SOME INTRA-PERSONAL FACTORS WHICH CAN CONTRIBUTE TO MARITAL DISORDER

One of the most significant facts about modern marriage and the disorders which may emerge in it is that with a few excep­tions which hardly ever apply, people over 21 who are un­married or whose marriage has been legally terminated are free to marry without any safeguards regarding their fitness or suitability for marriage. People under 21 and above a minimum age generally laid down by the law of their country can also marry under these conditions with no safeguard beyond the consent of their parents (which is often obtained under heavy pressure).

Once they are married, however, the doors shut and the exit is barred, even if they find to their mutual disillusionment that they have made a stupid mistake and have come to detest each other. It is of course essential that society should take all pos­sible steps to safeguard its own stability without too much in­terference with the liberty of its members, and the only prac­tical way to reconcile these two essentials would seem to be the fullest and most adequate preparation for marriage as a universal requirement.

The laws of any country concerning divorce, annulment and judicial separation are admittedly imperfect attempts to do what is basically impossible: to control human attitudes and human behavior by legislation. But every society has found it necessary to put such legal restraints on the dissolution of marriage because the community has an essential stake in its preservation wherever that is possible, and the courts are con­tinually on the lookout for attempts to evade the law by mutual arrangement and the faking of evidence.

The result of this freedom to marry without any necessary safeguards as to personal fitness is that many serious marital disorders are primarily caused by the personal unfitness of one or both partners for marriage. Fortunately this in many-cases is not beyond repair, and it is therefore important for all who seek to help those in marital trouble to be aware of the different kinds of unfitness and of ways by which they can possibly be helped. Some of the most common of them will therefore be discussed.

a. Ignorance or misinformation. With more widespread projects concerned with education for marriage there is prob­ably a steady lessening of ignorance and misinformation. But it is still true in most if not all countries that a large proportion of people who marry do so with the vaguest and often the most distorted ideas about such important matters as the sex­ual impulses in men and women, the meaning of love, the expression of love in the sexual relationship, the principles of personal relationships, and even about such "practical" matters as home management, cooking, sewing, carpentry, first aid and home nursing. Matters concerning parenthood and child management also have much to do with the general conduct of marriage, and can be suitably dealt with in the early years of marriage, if possible before the children come.

Everyone who marries has received a great deal of infor­mation of a kind, but in all too many cases it will have come from sources which are grossly inadequate and often com­pletely misleading, such as the general conversation of their friends, neighbors, colleagues, and, strangely less often, of their parents. This is supplemented by the subtle influences of the mass media, popular novels, "soap opera" on radio and television, and the movies, not to mention the seductive prac­tices in mass advertising. Even many apparently sophisticated and knowing people are found to have some very distorted ideas about some of the essential facts of life and of human relationships, so it has generally been found wise to take no­body for granted in this field.

In addition to correct information about the essential facts relating to sex, love, marriage, home making and parenthood, some training in self-control and in constructive attitudes to these things is essential. It has been found that merely giving information about such matters as sex may only make it more possible for undisciplined people to participate in all kinds of distorted and even abnormal sexual practices. Sex is an energy which needs harnessing and direction as well as knowledge, and this aspect of education for marriage will be dealt with in the next section ("Immaturity") as will other distorted atti­tudes.

This difficulty of lack of correct information and knowledge is of course best dealt with by education from earliest child­hood onwards, and particularly in a comprehensive premarital preparation, often with groups of young people, and with en­couragement of free discussion under wise and understanding leadership. But when it is discovered during counseling in marital disorders that there is considerable ignorance or mis­information about essential matters the counselor must be able to give the necessary information in a simple, natural and reverent manner, and in some cases to put the partners in touch with other sources of information, such as other coun­selors, or suitable books. But no book will take the place of the personal relationship between counselor and the part­ners for the passing on of information in the necessary atmos­phere of good personal rapport. Part of the training of a marriage counselor is therefore concerned with knowledge of these things, healthy attitudes to them, and ability to communi­cate them to people in an effective manner.

b. Immaturity is probably the background factor in most marital disorders, even when the presenting problem seems to be of some other kind. Marriage is meant to be a partnership between adults, and adulthood is not mainly a chronological matter, even though the law finds it necessary to regard people over 21 as adults. In general the personality of the immature person is basically sound, but untrained and undisciplined. This may bring about very intense strains and conflicts in marriage because the give and take and the responsibilities are too great for the undeveloped personality to cope with reasonably.

But as with ignorance, it is often quite possible to help people to overcome this personality deficiency. Considerable time and patience are required, but if the marriage can be held together for the necessary time and the people given enough encouragement and help, the marriage relationship itself can be a very maturing experience. Everyone has had the pleas­ure of watching quite immature youngsters growing and developing in maturity to a remarkable extent through the stimulus of marriage and parenthood.

Many immature people find it more difficult to develop be­cause their immaturity is combined with some degree of neurotic personality structure that makes them unreasonably demanding, unreasonably anxious, dependent or obsessional. This will be dealt with in a later section of these intra-personal factors.

Immaturity, with or without obvious neurotic trends in the personality, may well cause serious marital disorder because it may have led to hasty or unwise choice of mate. The mar­riage would then have begun under a great handicap. Even from the point of view of chronological age the qualities which attract a boy or girl at, say, 23 are often very different from those which attract at, say, 18; and it is what attracts at 23 that is more important for continuing marriage. This is not to suggest that people should not marry under 21, but that such early marriages may provide more and deeper challenges to people.

Another common effect of immaturity which may bear heavily on marriage is that either partner or both may have failed to cut loose from emotional dependence on their parents when they are still financially dependent on the parents, or have been so for a long time. In such cases of emotional dependence the parents themselves will often be unduly involved in any marital conflict between the young people, because they feel unable to stand by while their son or daughter is unhappy or in any marital difficulty. In many such cases the entry of parents into the situation, however well-meant and even necessary, may make the conflicts still more intense and less open to reconcili­ation.

Most of these situations will be helped much more by a trained marriage counselor who is not emotionally involved in the situation than by any parent or close friend. When they come to the marriage counselor the situation often demands great tact and patience, and considerable emotional stability in the counselor—particularly when he has to handle hostile and interfering relatives as well as the two young people in con­flict. It helps greatly if he can win the trust and the cooperation of the worried parents, which he has to do without disclosing the confidential material given to him by the partners. Then he might be able to induce the parents to keep their hands off the situation so that he has a more straightforward opportunity with the partners.

Immaturity may be general, involving all aspects of the per­sonality, or it may be limited to one or more aspects. For purposes of discussion it is useful to think of it from each point of view separately.

Physical immaturity, or lack of physical development, is generally fairly obvious, and will have been in most cases the subject of medical treatment. It is not often a factor in marital discord, and if it seems to be present it is appropriately referred to a doctor for help.

Intellectual immaturity may show itself as ignorance, rigidity of thought and ideas, or as plain stupidity. In these days it is possible to make some assessment in any doubtful cases by having various intelligence tests carried out. Here again this kind of immaturity may not have very profound effects on marriage unless there is gross inequality in intelligence. Many quite unintelligent people manage to get on well in marriage and even parenthood if they are generally good-natured, be­cause they tend to demand much less than more intelligent people from marriage.

Vocational immaturity may show itself by a lack of capa­bility for a reasonable job, either the running of a home on the part of a woman or the carrying out of a "breadwinning" job on the part of the man. Either of these may well bring strains on the marriage, and sometimes this situation can be relieved to some extent if the person or persons concerned are willing to accept reasonable training in the particular field.

Emotional immaturity is a very common intra-personal factor in one or both partners concerned in a marital disorder, and some aspects of it have already been mentioned, such as failure in emotional emancipation from parents, and impulsive or unwise choice of mate. Emotional immaturity may show it­self in many different ways.

A fairly common manifestation is in the sexual attitudes and relationships. In the extreme case homosexuality is likely to cause physical and emotional unfitness for marriage. In the majority of cases homosexuality is regarded as being an acquired rather than a constitutional disorder, and most of the openly homosexual men and women have no desire to marry. But a number of less marked cases of homosexuality are first in­duced to seek help after marriage when the sexual relationship has been found to be inadequate or quite hopeless.

In addition to these, emotional immaturity may show up in less definite form in what is termed "latent homosexuality." Every man and woman has some of the chemical and emotional attributes of the opposite sex. In the vigorously "masculine" man and the graciously "feminine" woman, these opposite qualities are not sufficiently marked to cause any disturbance. But sometimes an apparently normal heterosexual man or woman may have sufficient of the opposite qualities to bring about disorders in the sexual and the personal relationships of marriage. Many cases of impotence or partial impotence in men may be explained in this way, and some cases of frigidity in women. Others may be more fittingly regarded as due to some form of neurotic illness, but this is a matter for psychiatric appraisal.

Homosexuality, actual and latent, is regarded by Edmund Bergler, M.D. as primarily fear of the opposite sex rather than primarily attraction to persons of the same sex. If this be true, the attraction to people of the same sex may be caused or intensified by a deep need for companionship and intimacy, which after all is something which all normal people tend to have. It is possible that many cases in which husbands and wives find it difficult to be socially at ease with persons of the opposite sex, and even more when they feel the urge to con­gregate almost exclusively with members of their own sex, may have their roots in this form of emotional immaturity. The common social practice of men and women remaining in separate groups throughout the evening at a party may be a very mild example of this tendency. Some cases in which hus­bands for quite plausible reasons devote themselves to "all male" pursuits to the real neglect of their wives and families, or in which wives overdo it with "all female" projects to the neglect of their domestic obligations, may also be indications of this kind of emotional immaturity.

Many of these milder varieties of immaturity will not require—and the people will generally not be willing to undergo— any special medical or psychiatric treatment. If they are willing to face their difficulties and set out to develop their sociability to a more mature level, the marriage relationships will tend to improve to a more satisfactory state.

But when the difficulties are more serious and destructive to the marital harmony it may be necessary for the marriage counselor to refer one or both partners for some form of psychotherapy.

A second group of manifestations of emotional immaturity is in abnormal dependency. This is often seen as a kind of social timidity and shyness and a feeling of inadequacy and personal inferiority. Such people are often emotionally dependent on one or both parents, whose need to feel needed may well cause them to remain rather over-possessive. When they are away from home, even for a short time, they may feel a great lack of confidence and a need for someone on whom they can lean.

When two such young people meet, their emotional needs may encourage a very deep bond of sympathy between them, and a feeling of mutual confidence when they are together. If they are of the same sex this may intensify any homosexual trends, and if of the opposite sex it may well seem to them as "falling in love" and lead on to marriage. But it soon be­comes obvious that each is trying to use the other for reas­surance and support, and neither has the qualities to supply those needs in the other through the humdrum everyday con­cerns and the ups and downs of marriage. It was easy enough when they only saw each other outside their homes and all dressed up and on their best behavior, but marriage may well bring mutual disillusionment and recrimination, and even the possibility that one or both may be attracted to someone else who again may appear to satisfy the dependency needs.

This kind of situation may often be recognized by a good pre-marital counselor, because of small indications in either of them of possessiveness, sulkiness when demands are not fully met, and general "spoiled child" behavior. This would suggest that much of the "love" into which they have fallen is really self-love, and not what they think it to be. It may be very difficult or even impossible for the two young people, so deeply "in love," to see anything of this, and the counselor's most helpful contribution might then be to try to keep their mutual confidence in him, so that the way might be open for him to help them when the almost inevitable troubles come.

When the disillusionments and recriminations begin after marriage the emotional conflicts may become very intense, and there may be deep wounds on both sides, even leading to a "nervous breakdown" in one of them. In our society, in which the husband is generally the breadwinner, emotional immaturity is generally more destructive to marriage when it occurs in men than in women. Two common situations of this kind may be described.

In the first case Mary may find after marriage, to her in­creasing anxiety and despair, that she only has about one quarter of John's loyalty and companionship, the rest being held grimly and determinedly by John's mother, who "never approved of Mary anyhow," and has so over-mothered John that he has never been able to cut himself loose from her apron-strings. Now he can't decide anything without asking his mother's opinion, and he accepts it and acts on it irrespec­tive of Mary's ideas or indeed of the true interests of their home and family. His mother has only to make a skillfully vague implication of her "disappointment" at John's "ingra­titude," with the spoken or unspoken climax, "after all I've done for you," and he is clay in her hands. If John is ever induced to do anything of which his mother might disapprove he may not even be able to tell her, "for fear it might upset her."

In the second case it soon transpires that in the home John must get everything he wants, and when he wants it, or there's trouble. If a meal is a few minutes late, or the toast is slightly burned, or the egg slightly overcooked, he gets angry even to the point of losing his temper. He expects Mary to be at his beck and call in everything, as his over attentive mother used to be, and when she doesn't fulfill these insatiable de­mands he gets into a sulky or angry mood and accuses her of not loving him any more. At the same time he has given up all the little attentions and gestures of "love" which he used to offer before their marriage, and he doesn't feel any respon­sibility to help Mary in any of her domestic activities, even when she is ill or tired. Mary may then have to face the extra­ordinary inconsistency of a husband who is a charming fellow to everyone outside the home, and a touchy, moody, demand­ing "spoiled child" in the home, who constantly indulges in temper tantrums and even physical violence when his demands are not fulfilled. She finds it impossible to understand, and her desperate efforts to cope with the emotional scenes only seem to make things worse.

This kind of situation occurs among otherwise good, gen­erous, conscientious people. John's mother would probably be astounded at any suggestion that she had over-mothered him. She, like many middle-aged mothers, may have ached to feel needed, and found little emotional inspiration from her own husband. She would then have unwittingly used her son to fill the aching emotional void, and failed to see that as he grew up he couldn't continue to need her in quite the same way. So instead of turning her attention outward to some kind of social service in which she could continue to feel needed, she kept her claws fastened on John, who always had been affectionate to her and ready to do what she wanted.

The same kind of situation of course can happen with an over dependent, demanding wife, who will never let her hus­band out of her grasp, and who turns on a temper tantrum whenever he goes against her demands in any way. Such a wife may well team up with her mother against her husband, who will feel very much "odd man out" or even the "villain" of the piece.

This demanding attitude may often express itself in demands for frequent sexual intercourse by the husband at all kinds of times of day or night, irrespective of his wife's feelings or do­ings. This ignores the fact that love, of which intercourse is a deep symbol, is not properly something one can have on de­mand, but rather something one seeks to win from one's part­ner. It may also express itself in the opposite kind of demand from the wife, that her husband must never have any sexual relations with her. The "spoiled child" of either sex will show this character in any aspect of personal relationships, including sex.

In some cases the marital disorder is triggered off by a change in one of the partners some years after the wedding. It may be that a demanding husband finds a wife whose de­pendency is expressed by willingly allowing him to dominate her. Then for some reason, possibly after the children come and she becomes more mature, or possibly because his demands become unbearable, she begins to stand firm on her own auton­omy, and to resist his domination. It may be very difficult for such a husband to adapt himself to this change in the rela­tionship, and it may need the skillful and patient help of a good marriage counselor to keep the marriage from breaking up if the husband fails to see and accept what is happening.

A somewhat similar difficulty may happen when, some years after the wedding, the husband begins to grow to maturity much more rapidly than his wife. This may happen because of promotion in his job, with much greater challenges to him, the association with more mature people, and possibly travel in connection with his work. In such cases it may be very difficult for his wife to "keep up" with him, and it may demand more tact than he possesses to avoid making her feel inferior and inadequate. Here again the frank facing of such a situa­tion and a genuine sustained attempt by both of them to meet it, possibly with the help of a good counselor, may well help his wife to rise to the challenge and develop many latent quali­ties of great value.

Another form of immaturity may be described as spiritual immaturity, and it may also show itself in various ways. There may be a kind of spiritual overdependency, which looks on God as a kind of over-indulgent "father figure," and prayer as a sort of spiritual Aladdin's lamp. This kind of attitude may get by while things are going well, but it will not sustain any­one in times of great strain and trouble because it is unreal. If it is present in a husband it may encourage him to be quite irresponsible and to take no thought at all for the morrow instead of the "no anxious thought" suggested in the Sermon on the Mount. The more mature spiritual attitude is surely what has been described as "the higher carelessness," doing all that one can, with all the help available, and then being con­tent to leave the results—or apparent lack of result—in the "better hand than ours."

In addition to this "magic and superstition" kind of spiritual immaturity, there is often a kind that shows itself in very rigid spiritual attitudes, which tries to insulate those who have it from "the world, the flesh and the devil," and to keep them in an ivory tower of exclusiveness, completely out of harmony with the Founder of Christianity, who could dine with publicans and sinners, and deliberately make His way among all kinds of people. The most common difficulty that such atti­tudes produce in marriage is that many such rigid people are not content to apply their ideas to their own lives (which of course they have every right to do if they see fit), but also try to impose them upon other people, particularly upon their marriage partners, and upon the children, irrespective of the feelings of the others.

Some difficulties of this kind are brought about "when, some time after marriage, one of the partners undergoes a "conver­sion" to a rigid religious sect; and in tremendous religious zeal, and considerable blindness to the implications of what he is doing, makes it his most important life-work to "convert" his partner and the family. The inner blindness is generally so great, and the inner conviction so strong, that even the most skillful and patient counseling may find no point of entry into his rigid formulations. The other partner may well be helped to carry on with patience and tolerance, quietly standing firm on her own convictions and being willing to "agree to differ."

There seems to be a rich field of specialized counseling on this spiritual level, so that marriage counselors can have some really competent spiritually equipped authorities to whom they may refer people with such problems, if they are willing to be referred. But this is by no means likely to happen in the rigid cases, and those in which an unreal religion happens to act as the opium of spiritually immature people.

Before leaving the subject of immaturity as an intra-personal factor in marital disorders it is well to remind ourselves that many of the ostensible causes of marital conflict are really out­ward manifestations of immaturity. Some of these may be con­sidered at this point.

Intemperance in one form or another is a very common ap­parent cause of marital breakdown. Repeated drunkenness has been put forward as one of the most common of all causes by people who are mainly concerned with the more obvious de­structive factors without looking far beneath the surface to deeper causes. Here again the boundary line between emo­tional immaturity and neurotic illness as a cause of alcoholism is vague and ill defined, and it is more of academic interest to the marriage counselor, because it is outside his province to attempt the cure of such intra-personal disorders. When it becomes a serious threat to a marriage, or indeed to any per­son's health or general welfare, it is properly the concern of such professional help as given by psychiatrists, often helped by a period of institutional care and discipline, and such "mutual help" organizations as Alcoholics Anonymous. It may be the counselor's task, when such troubles come to him in his marriage counseling, to try to persuade the alcoholic to submit himself for proper treatment, and to see the value and the pos­sibility of relief.

The alcoholic may provide a very difficult problem in mar­riage counseling because he seldom has any idea of how his conduct appears to other people, and he may be so much at the mercy of his addiction that even with all the misery of "hangovers" he still has little motivation to undergo the dif­ficult discipline involved in overcoming it. He seems to have little recognition of the suffering and distress imposed on his partner and of the intensity of his demands in many cases for sexual intercouse at the very time when his wife is likely to feel nauseated by his crude uncouth behavior. Beyond all of this there is often a further problem in the excessive spending of money on his alcoholic excesses, and in the growing neglect of his home and surroundings and the progressive loss of the respect of his growing children, even if by some good fortune he is able to keep a reasonable job.

Another form of intemperance which may have quite devastating effects on marriage is in the spending of money, par­ticularly in response to what may be termed the gambling fever. When this gets hold of any man or woman it may bring the partnership to financial ruin unless some strong measures can be taken to restrain the spending, and unless some good psychotherapy can bring the underlying immaturity or neurotic trends to the surface so that they can be dealt with decisively. Here again such difficulties are generally best referred by the marriage counselor for appropriate psychotherapy, without which any apparent recovery is likely to be temporary.

The overspending of time may also be destructive to mar­riage. For example, one of the partners may become so ad­dicted to some craze that his home and even his job are neg­lected, not to mention his personality. Almost any activity can become the object of over addiction, even religious activities, and these addictions are also indications of either emotional immaturity or of definite emotional or mental disorder. They are seldom helped greatly by exhortation, but are more appro­priately regarded as symptoms of deeper disorder which is best dealt with by psychotherapy.

Irresponsibility is also frequently suggested as a cause of marital disorder, but here again it is probably better regarded from the point of view of treatment as an outward and visible sign of immaturity. It is more within the field of counseling than the various forms of intemperance except when it is a symptom of deeper emotional disorder, such as the psycho­pathic personality, which will be referred to in due course. Some cases of irresponsibility can be helped over a period of time by the marriage partner, through repeated exposure of the irresponsible person to situations which demand responsibility, taking the risk of evasion of the challenge and being ready to accept some inconvenience when that happens.

c. Illness, physical and mental, may sometimes be found as a decisive intra-personal causative factor in marital disorder.

The heavy burden of severe or repeated physical illness, possibly including hospitalization and surgical operations, may overwhelm married couples who have not the physical, emo­tional and possibly the financial stability necessary to cope with it. When it happens early in a marriage it might be par­ticularly difficult for them to negotiate. In some cases the help of social workers and of good neighbors and relatives will have a decisive effect on the preservation of the marriage.

A less obvious kind of physical illness fairly common in these days, and often a source of strain to a marriage is ex­haustion from overwork, particularly in the case of young mothers with demanding children and insufficient help. They often become deeply disillusioned by the never-ending daily grind, so different from their rosy dreams about marriage and parenthood. They are too tired to be of much inspiration to their husbands when they come home tired after a trying day to an untidy house, a late meal, crabby children and a miser­able wife. Tempers tend to be much more easily provoked, and the two partners may easily find themselves drawing fur­ther and further apart. There may also be financial worries to add to the trouble.

These situations need counseling to allow each of the part­ners the opportunity of unburdening disturbed and hostile feelings and apprehensions and worries. Sometimes this is enough to enable them to take hold again, with the help of relatives and friends. Sometimes they need help towards more efficient household management and better use of available financial resources. In such troubles as these marriage counselors need to have an awareness of the social welfare resources that may be available and appropriate to the situation.

The most common mental illness met with in the background of marital disorders is what is called psychoneurosis, or neurosis for short. The marriage counselor does not set out to treat neurotic illness, but he must be able to recognize some of the indications of such disorders, so that he is less likely to waste time and effort in trying to reason people out of them, or to make them worse by misunderstanding. He is then more con­fidently able to refer them if necessary for medical treatment.

How can they be recognized? A simple description has been offered by Albert Ellis, M.A., Ph.D. in his book "How to Live with a Neurotic" (Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, N. Y.). "Psychologists usually label as 'neurotic' only those individuals who are so inappropriate in their feelings and so ineffective and disruptive in their behavior that they sooner or later get into rather serious difficulties of their own making."

The inappropriateness of feeling may be shown in undue anxiety, irrational fears (such as claustrophobia), crippling in­decision even about straightforward matters, extreme touchi­ness and hostility over trivial things, seeing "insults" in per­fectly natural attitudes, and suspicion of even the most genuine motives. In other cases there may be obsessional feelings, com­pulsive striving for perfection and rigid demands on others for perfection, blaming them bitterly when they fail to meet ex­pectations. There may also be extreme or morbid guilt feelings.

These inappropriate feelings generally extend beyond the domestic relationships to every other relationship. There are frequent conflicts in the person's job, in which everyone else is wrong and he is the "injured party." This expression of in­appropriateness in a wider field may help to differentiate neurotic illness from the emotional immaturity already con­sidered, but there is no clear point of division between the two.

The neurotic is constantly "ridden" rather than in control of his life, he is compulsive, self-centered and demanding, even demanding love and friendship at the same time he is doing everything possible to alienate those who would help him. When it suits him he can turn on the charm, but this is superficial and short lived, and turns quickly to hostility when his desires are not fulfilled. He may have the capacity to succeed but stands all the time in his own light, making the most plausi­ble excuses, and many obviously stupid ones, for his failures.

The important feature about all of these inappropriate feel­ings and attitudes and the ineffective and disruptive behavior is that they are not open to "reason" or to the direct awareness or control of the neurotic or of anyone else. They can only be tackled by helping the person to work backward from them so as to discover the false concepts and assumptions about life and about people, including himself, which are behind the symptoms; for example that other people "must" fulfil any person's arbitrary expectations, or that love is something that can be obtained or preserved at "pistol point." There are many such false assumptions about life and they are extremely varied, and well protected by very strong psychic defenses. That is one reason why psychotherapy is such a skilled, patient and complex art.

It is easy to see how such intense and falsely based feelings can be so destructive to the marriage relationship, and how all attempts at "sweet reason," criticism, advice and admonition will be doomed to failure. Unless the neurotic is willing to face the "blood, toil, tears and sweat" of possibly prolonged psychotherapy (which means accepting his need for help), the trouble tends to recur.

An interesting and important aspect of neurosis in marriage is that people often make their choice of a mate in a manner greatly influenced by their neurotic needs. For example an insecure boy who has a neurotic need to get girls to "fall" for him might come to marry a girl with a sense of inferiority who needs a "masterful" boy. When the neuroses of the two partners "neutralize" each other the marriage might well be very satisfactory to both of them. When the relationship is or becomes satisfactory it may be quite harmful to the marriage to set out to treat the neurosis of one of them, because the whole balance of the marriage may be completely upset. It is often better in such cases to "let sleeping dogs lie."

Another type of mental abnormality which can be very de­structive to the marriage relationship is what is called the psychopathic personality. This term covers a number of dif­ferent kinds of disorder seen primarily in the field of behavior. While the neurotic feels a significant part of the trouble within himself, however much upset his trouble may bring about for other people, the psychopath usually shows little signs of dis­turbed inner feelings, and practically the whole disturbance is felt by other people.

In many ways the behavior and relationships of the psycho­path are comparable with those of the grossly immature, and this is in harmony with certain physical characteristics of the psychopath. The tracings generally found in electroencepha­lograms of psychopathic persons are often similar to those found in children, and the conformation of the capillary loops in the nail bed of their fingers is also frequently like that found in children.

"These people" wrote David Stafford-Clark ("Psychiatry Today" Penguin Books, 1952) "are impulsive, feckless, unwill­ing to accept the results of experience and unable to profit by them, sometimes prodigal of effort but utterly lacking in per­sistence, plausible but insincere, demanding but indifferent to appeals, dependable only in their constant unreliability, faith­ful only to infidelity, rootless, unstable, rebellious, and unhappy. A survey of their lives will reveal an endless succession of jobs, few of which have been held for more than six months, many of which have been abandoned after a few days; very little love but often a great number of adventures, very little hap­piness despite a ruthless and determined pursuit of immediate gratification."

It is easy to see how unfit such people are for the respon­sibilities and obligations of marriage and parenthood, and there is no doubt that they are responsible for a great deal of misery, bewilderment and despair in their marriages. It is extraordinary how much they are trusted in spite of many failures, and how often their plausibility and even charm (when it suits them) get them (temporarily) out of trouble. But their lack of ap­parent insight, their unwillingness to undergo any kind of psychotherapy, and the futility of most efforts to help them to better social responsibility, make the outlook generally far from promising. In most cases of any severity the marriage either breaks up or else the other partner makes the best of an intensely difficult situation with whatever safeguards can be established. In some cases it is found after a period of strain and conflict, and possibly great financial loss, that the person has made a bigamous marriage without giving any hint of the existence of a previous wife and family.

The most important consideration relating to the psycho­pathic personality as it affects marriage is the discovery of the disorder before marriage, which would generally be during pre-marital counseling. It is possible that very much unhappiness in marriage would be prevented if more people understood something of the indications of this abnormality and of the difficulty of changing the character of such people. This might involve considerable knowledge of the past activities of pros­pective marital partners, and this is much more difficult in these days when so many people choose their partners from outside their own neighborhood, and therefore may know much less about their backgrounds. The choice of a life partner is surely important enough to warrant a fairly full knowledge, rather than a series of unsupported "assurances," or a very short ac­quaintance of a fairly superficial kind.

The third group of mental disorders which may render people unfit for the responsibilities and obligations of mar­riage and parenthood includes what are called the psychotic illnesses, or in more popular terms the insanities. The occur­rence of a psychotic illness does not necessarily bring about a hopeless marital situation, any more than a severe physical illness will do. Treatment of many people with such illnesses is much more successful in these days, and many of them are very responsive to the devoted care of an understanding partner and relatives.

The psychotic may generally be distinguished from the neurotic, although there is no sharp line of demarcation, by the fact that he lacks insight into reality as well as into his own inner attitudes, while the neurotic, with defective insight into himself, generally has reasonable insight into the realities of life. Because of his lack of insight into reality the psychotic shows more irrational attitudes, and is much less "accessible" to counseling and psychotherapy than the neurotic.

The commonest types of psychotic illness are the "affective disorders" which mainly but not entirely involve feelings, and the various forms of schizophrenia, in which feeling, thinking and behavior are generally all involved in the disorder.

The affective psychoses are more common in the second half of life, and are of two general types, which in some cases alter­nate with one another in the same person. First are the de­pressive illnesses often termed "melancholia," characterized by progressive inconsolable sadness and by deadness of feeling and utter pessimism. There may be strong delusions of guilt and failure, and about bodily functions. The other type includes the elated-feeling people, with bouts of tireless energy and enthusiasm and increasing restlessness, in which everyone is expected to share.

The melancholic people may bring some strains on marriage, but with reasonable understanding, which avoids attempts to argue them out of their depressions and delusions, they are generally manageable except for certain agitated types that need some restraint. There is often some danger of suicide, and such people are usually hospitalized and given special treat­ment, which is reasonably successful in many cases.

People suffering from mania may need urgent restraint in some cases, and particularly some protective measures against overenthusiastic spending of money, which may rapidly reduce a family to financial straits. They are usually responsive to treatment in hospital, and may remain well for some time until a further attack of mania or a gradual drift into a period of melancholia.

Schizophrenia in its various forms is commonest in the first half of life, although one form, the paranoid or delusional, often occurs in older people, either as a gradual development from the earlier form or as an apparently fresh illness. The most common early indications of schizophrenia are indiffer­ence, incongruity of emotions, such as giggling in the face of tragedy, irresponsibility and lack of initiative, dreaminess, and emotional withdrawal. There may be bizarre associations of ideas, delusions and hallucinations, and in one form fixed sym­bolic posturing. In early stages a young person may become involved in an impulsive marriage, and with the strains and responsibilities of marriage, and particularly those of pregnancy and childbirth, may suffer a serious breakdown in health and sanity.

The most difficult "psychotic" marital problem is probably that of what is called "paranoid schizophrenia," a chronic dis­order characterized by fixed delusions, which are woven into the person's total attitudes and are completely resistant to any kind of argument or persuasion. They may sound completely plausible at the beginning, and often cause very great embar­rassment, inconvenience and distress to many people, and par­ticularly to the marriage partner.

A common delusion affecting the marriage relationship is that the partner is being unfaithful and carrying on a constant "affair" with someone else. The attempts by the partner to re­assure such a person are completely ineffective, and often add to the emotional tension. All kinds of reasonable actions are adduced as "proof," and bitter aggressive recriminations may be made, even for hours on end during the night, the person not allowing the "victim" any opportunity to sleep, even fol­lowing him into another room to carry on the accusation.

As time goes on the character of the delusions may become more obviously false, for example the idea that neighbors are injuring the person with electric waves, or "thought waves," or the conviction that a group of "super scientists" can "see" everything the person sees and can speak and act through him, or that the person is God's anointed agent to rule the world. There is no limit to the range of these delusions, but their main characteristic is their fixity and lack of change except very slowly over the years.

No successful treatment for the relief of these delusions is at present known, and unless they are of a kind or intensity that would bring a risk of danger to the person or to others it is not often necessary to put the sufferer in hospital. The marital partner therefore finds that it is either necessary to develop some way of accepting and tolerating the fantastic ideas, or else, if the situation becomes impossible to the partner or the children, to break up the marriage. In most cases the partner finds ways of coping with the situation with help for most of the time, and when there are bouts of greater intensity the person may be given some hospital care to tide him over the difficult period. Deluded people are often easier in their minds in the "protected" environment of a mental hospital than they are at home.

In many cases the partner will be able to get some help from the doctor about ways of handling the situation, but sometimes the marriage counselor may be asked about it. In general it is best to accept the feelings and ideas of the deluded person without argument, and say, in effect, "if that is so what do you want to do about it?" This does not mean agreeing with the delusions, or disagreeing with them. When bitter accusations are made it may be best again to say "You think I'm doing so and so?" with no attempt to defend, explain, or argue. It may be necessary to say "We will just have to agree to differ on that." It is not at all necessary to defend oneself against all accusations, or even most accusations. It is better to allow one's life to be its own justification and to allow others to think unjustly if they have made up their minds.

With steady and patient and non-retaliatory handling, and with acceptance of the deluded person, it is often possible to carry on, and sometimes the delusions seem to become less in­tense over the years, although with periods of greater pressure at times. But it always demands great restraint and devotion, and a firmness that carries on one's own life calmly in spite of the attempts to upset it. Marriage counselors can sometimes help the partner greatly in this.

It seems clear then that when any form of physical or mental illness becomes a threat to the preservation of a good marital relationship the counselor's task is in two directions. It is first to recognize that an illness exists by having some idea of the main indications of illness, and of the various kinds of illness, so that he may recommend appropriate medical help. His sec­ond task is to help the sufferer if possible, and even more the partner, to live with the situation if he is willing to do so.

It is certainly not necessary for the counselor who is not a medical practitioner to recognize the exact nature of any ill­ness, nor can he set out to treat any illness. Diagnosis and treat­ment lie within the field of medicine and it is important for marriage counselors to have close contact with medical consultants of the appropriate kinds, family doctors, physicians, psychiatrists, gynecologists and pediatricians. Conversely mar­riage counselors can be of great help to doctors because many of the disturbed people who go to doctors for help are found to be suffering from strains and conflicts in marriage which have a material effect on their illness and on the efficacy of any medical treatment. Many people who come to marriage coun­selors are actually referred to them by doctors.

In the matter of referral to psychiatrists it is wise for a marriage counselor who believes a client needs psychiatric help to refer him first to the client's own family doctor if he has one, and to suggest a list of family doctors from which he can choose if he has no regular doctor. It is then quite appro­priate for the family doctor to make a suitable referral. This practice has two important advantages. It is less upsetting to the client to be told that the counselor believes him to be in need of "medical" help than "psychiatric" help. A suggestion that he needs psychiatric help will not always be well accepted from a "layman," and may be regarded as an "accusation" that he is "mental." He will take such referral much better from a medical man. Second, it is often valuable for the psychiatrist to have a family doctor cooperating with him, and possibly available to tide over an emergency when the psychiatrist may not be available. This is best secured by the referral being carried out by the family doctor.

d. Irreligion as an intra-personal factor may be distinguished from difference of religious denomination and other forms of religious incompatibility, which are more fittingly considered with the inter-personal factors. Irreligion is difficult to define in simple terms, and it may not necessarily correspond to out­ward or conventional indications. It may be thought of as a lack of an adequate sense of purpose, and consequently of values; gross self-centeredness and selfishness. In this sense it will obviously make for great strain and difficulty in marriage, which requires some genuine concern for the welfare of others, some willingness to accept and forgive in realistic awareness of one's own fallibility. Professor John MacMurray once ob­served that "the field of religion is that of human relationships," and the Founder of Christianity laid down one predominant criterion by which the quality of our religion can be tested, "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, that ye love one another" (St. John 13:35).

It is not the province of the marriage counselor as such to preach religion to those who come for help. But he may be able to contribute much to such a situation, first through the quality of his own empathy and acceptance of both partners; second, by respecting their own religious attitudes even when they are markedly different from his, and looking with them at the implications of their attitudes with regard to the mar­riage relationships; and third, through referral to someone who may be able to give constructive help in any religious diffi­culties which may be recognized. No marriage counselor has any right to use his position to seek to impose any of his own beliefs or attitudes on anyone else. He may "let his light shine" out of himself, but that is quite a different matter from trying to make it shine into any other person.

We have considered four sets of intra-personal factors which can contribute to marital disorder, ignorance (or misinforma­tion), immaturity, illness and irreligion. Although they are primarily intra-personal they cannot help bringing a degree of strain on the relationship. But they generally need to be dealt with mostly on the individual level, sometimes with the help of an appropriate person. As we have seen they are often best helped by a wise referral unless the marriage counselor has some special competence in the field of individual therapy concerned. At the same time the marriage counselor may well have an important role in helping the other partner to live with the disturbed situation while any individual help is being ob­tained, and possibly when the intra-personal disorder persists in spite of any attempts to help. He may also be able to help two disturbed people to live more peacefully together and to work out some flexible "live and let live" arrangement.

2. SOME INTER-PERSONAL FACTORS WHICH CAN CONTRIBUTE TO MARITAL DISORDER

These are factors which primarily concern the relationship between the partners rather than the specific fitness of either of them for marriage. Those who come into close contact with marital disorders find many examples of people who are indi­vidually well developed in every way, and able to get on well with all kinds of people, but yet find themselves in deep and destructive conflict with each other. This has become more common in these days, partly because we expect much more from marriage in happiness and fulfilment than our grand­parents seemingly did, and partly because of what is termed "the emancipation of women," because of which they are no longer compelled to put up with tyranny and cruelty through dependence on their husbands. Modern marriage demands much more from the partners than ever before, and there are consequently many more risks of breakdown. Disturbances in the quality of the marital relationship need therefore be con­sidered in relation to the "role perceptions," the "role expecta­tions," and the consequent "role frustrations" of the partners and of modern society. This social and cultural aspect will be dealt with in the next section, on environmental factors in marital disorder.

a. Incompatibility is commonly suggested by the partners and by their relatives as "the cause" of marital disorder, and this is made more plausible by the fact that when people find themselves in conflict their differences become intensified and much more distressing. Some attention will first be given to various kinds of incompatibility that are found in marital dis­orders, and then to the whole question of incompatibility in general.

Sexual incompatibility seems to be very common in marriage, and many couples accept it, though not at all happily, without allowing it to bring their marriage into any great danger. In some marriages it appears to be the primary cause of deepening marital conflict—when, for example, the partners from the beginning find themselves unable to carry out the sexual rela­tionship to any degree of satisfaction and come to feel disillu­sioned and frustrated, or when their whole attitudes to sex are found to be so different as to seem irreconcilable. In such cases an apparently good personal relationship may become greatly and progressively strained, especially when the two partners have had high expectations about the sexual relationship, and regarded it as the main basis of their partnership.

But in many cases what appears to be sexual incompatibility is really of deeper origin, either in the inter-personal relational area, or even in the intra-personal field already considered.

In the relational area sexual incompatibility may be a mani­festation of a deeper personal incompatibility. For example Harry and Helen have reached the point of almost despairing of their marriage, because Helen has been unable to meet any­thing like all of Harry's persistent demands, even though she has tried all she knows to satisfy him. The situation has now become much worse because she has found evidence of an affair between Harry and one of the girls at the office. They have decided, with the help of some well-meaning friends, that this must be a matter of sexual incompatibility, and that there is little hope of making their marriage work. But they came for counseling, and the counselor was able to look with them behind the apparent point of conflict.

As the picture unfolded it appeared that Harry was the only child of a very insecure marriage. His father had an eye for many attractive women, and took little responsibility in their home. His mother reacted to her husband's neglect by over-coddling and overindulging her son, so that Harry grew up as a "spoiled child" who got everything he wanted. He then fell on his feet in a good job, and was clever—and unscrupulous —enough to get practically everything he wanted there too. Then he met Helen and carried her off her feet, and he got the only girl he ever wanted without any trouble. It was almost inevitable that he should go on to assume that he should get all he wanted in the sexual relationship whenever he wanted it, and that he should resent any "frustration" from his wife when his mother had always given in to him.

Helen, on the other hand, had had a rather sheltered up­bringing, by good but reserved parents, with whom she had never felt free to discuss any of the "facts of life." She had no brothers and no other close "boy friends," and when Harry came along she plunged eagerly into marriage with little or no intellectual or emotional preparation for it. Her difficulties only drove her more deeply into her shell, which made Harry more insistent and aggressive than ever, until finally, like his father before him, he found some "comfort" outside his mar­riage.

Here is gross incompatibility, but it is not primarily sexual. It is a deep personal incompatibility (Harry being domineer­ing and Helen lacking in confidence), which is using the sexual relationship as a battleground. This is no hair-splitting distinction, because the healing of such a situation has nothing to do with hormones and everything to do with psychology: with the basic assumptions about life and about people that were behind the attitudes of Harry and Helen to each other. These things are much more amenable to change than hor­mones. Until Harry can "come to earth" about his demands through seeing himself more clearly it will be very difficult for Helen to cope with the situation, for after all love is not fit­tingly given at pistol point. When Helen too gains better insight into her own attitudes the way will be open for growth to more mature responsiveness. As they each come to better under­standing of the other personality they will find themselves more ready to accept and adjust to their differences, but this will need time and patience, and persistence through many apparent setbacks.

In the intra-personal field an apparent sexual incompatibility may be due to the fact that one of the partners has a sexual abnormality with which no normal marriage partner could be compatible. The frankly homosexual man or woman could only be sexually "compatible" with another of the same sex, and there are many impotent men and frigid women whose difficulties lie deep in their own personalities and need to be dealt with there. Some apparently impotent men and frigid women are basically adequate, but are reacting to a disordered personal relationship with their partners, for example, the ner­vous man who feels that his masculinity is at stake, and is quite potent with a prostitute but quite impotent with his wife, be­cause of her expressed expectations of him.

A further example of sexual incompatibility is found when one of the partners is the victim of grossly abnormal sexual urges or various forms of sexual deviation. These conditions are generally outside the competence of the marriage coun­selor, and such people are most appropriately referred for any suitable help they are willing to accept.

Personal incompatibility may of course take many different forms, from the superficial "nothing much in common" to the deepest levels of personality differences. On the more super­ficial levels it is often found that the partners gradually drift further apart because they each become more and more in­volved in individual interests and fail to preserve or cultivate any worthwhile interests in common. This is one kind of in­attention to the marriage, which will be dealt with later.

Another kind of personal incompatibility may be due to different levels of intelligence or education, especially when either partner is emotionally immature to the extent of being unable to avoid jealousy of the more advanced one. This is generally more common in our culture when the wife is much more intellectually advanced than the husband, and even though she loves him deeply and avoids anything that could be con­strued as "rubbing it in," he finds it difficult to avoid feelings of inferiority, however able and successful he may be in his own field. This is important in pre-marital counseling, mainly for its recognition and for the awareness of the need for de­velopment of emotional maturity and psychic security so that acceptance is easier. With careful help this kind of difficulty can often be overcome by the partners.

There may also be gross differences between the partners regarding the principles and methods of child management, which may contribute much to marital disorder. The attitudes of many people to such things are derived more than they may realize from what they absorbed in their own upbringing, and to that extent they are not quite fully open to "sweet reason." Ideally such questions should be faced before marriage, and at least before the arrival of the first child, so that they can present a "united front" to the children. But this is often not done, and arguments, backed by "righteous indignation" grow more and more intense. The fact that children may suffer far more from the constant parental conflicts than from the kind of management either parent would employ does not seem to penetrate the emotionally disturbed minds of the parents until the emotional tensions are "unbottled" fully in good counsel­ing. In some cases the conflict regarding child management is not what it seems, but rather a deep emotional conflict between the partners which fixes itself on any available battleground. As they unburden their feelings fully this will often become clear, and until it does, to the partners as well as the counselor, the fights will go on.

Another form of personal incompatibility may be found in the various kinds of "mixed marriage," between Christian and non-Christian, between Roman Catholic and Anglican, Epis­copal, or Protestant, and even at times between two closely related Protestant denominations. People's denominational and religious attitudes are largely accidents of birth, and they are imbedded so deeply as to be often out of the range of reason. Here again the trouble is not so much the difference, although this has difficulties in it especially with training of children. The trouble is mainly on the level of emotional immaturity, which brings intolerance and attempts at domination or the imposition of religious attitude on the partner. Such differ­ences need competent counseling if they are to be faced in the light of reality and resolved to the extent of mutual accept­ance. The same principles apply, sometimes to an even greater extent, in the case of marked racial and cultural differences, especially when there are also color differences.

Deeper (though not necessarily more intense) than any of these "acquired" differences which may make for personal in­compatibility are inborn "temperamental" differences of per­sonality type, which may have much to do with marital disorder, especially when, as often, they are not understood and accepted.

Here, for example, are Tom and Betty, married for four years, with two children. They have apparently been in increasing conflict almost from the beginning of their marriage. Now that they look back on it, the conflicts were there during their engagement, but they thought that it would be easy to work them out after their marriage.

There are masses of complaints on both sides, but they seem to be reducible to fairly definite differences. Tom's main com­plaint about Betty is that she is so utterly careless and irre­sponsible that he is continually worried that he will be reduced to bankruptcy in his finances and humiliation with his friends. Betty on the other hand takes the view that there's no such problem at all except in Tom's imagination, and that he makes so much of a fuss about every decision that she is driven to desperation. When she wants to invite her friends to their home Tom does his best to dissuade her; or if they do come he behaves in a most ungracious manner, or retires into his den, which she feels is insulting.

As the stories unfold it soon becomes clear that Betty is what Jung called an extrovert type of personality, completely natural and spontaneous, friendly to everyone, and impulsive in almost everything she does. Tom has to admit that even with her impulsiveness she has so far proved that her judgment or "intuition" is sound, and that his deep apprehensiveness is not based on any previous failure on her part. But he finds her in­tolerant of his need to take time to think out all the different aspects of any proposition or decision, and also of his rooted suspicion of the motives of people whom she "just knows" are good and reliable.

Tom is an accountant, who is building up a first class pro­fessional reputation for his reliability and conscientiousness, and he has his office imbued with these great principles. He is not a good mixer, but he has the respect of his associates and clients, and feels content and competent in his work. In other words he is an introvert type of personality in Jung's classification. He had always been shy of girls as he grew up, but Betty's spontaneous friendliness and charm overcame his shy­ness to the point that he proposed to her, and she was attracted by his conscientious and steady nature; he was so different from many of the boys who had tried to sweep her off her feet. They got on very well together until they found them­selves in the intimate relationship of marriage, and then each began to find the attitudes of the other difficult to accept.

It is possible that with some encouragement Tom might develop more sociability, and Betty might tone down some of her impulsiveness, but these qualities of extroversion and intro­version are deeply imbedded in Betty's and Tom's personal­ities and are not open to radical change. But with better understanding each can learn to accept the other, and to be more responsive to the better aspects of each other's person­alities.

Other types of personality which may bear on marriage are the "schizoid" or suspicious type, the obsessional or very par­ticular, the "mercurial" or "cyclothyme," and the "hysteric" or over-dramatic. Tom had some obsessional and schizoid ele­ments in his personality. The way to better marital harmony is through acceptance of each other's personality types.

It seems obvious that in any consideration of incompatibility we must face the fact that it is a matter of degree, depending on what amount and intensity of difference people can toler­ate. The word "compatible" comes from two Latin words and means "able to suffer with," or "endure together." There are obviously limits as to what can be endured together in mar­riage, but there are some considerations about incompatibility that are most relevant to marriage counseling.

The first is that people do not necessarily have to remain as they are. Sick marriages, like sick persons, can often be healed if given some help. It seems clear that any help is more likely to succeed when the underlying factors in the incom­patibility are discovered and dealt with, and the plausible rationalizations are honestly faced. Many examples of "incom­patibility" are more fittingly regarded as intolerance and these can only be dealt with when this is faced and accepted. Others as we have seen are not of the same kind as they appear, and "sexual incompatibility" may be a manifestation of personal incompatibility, in which case it needs to be dealt with from the personal rather than the sexual point of view.

Secondly the whole question needs to be seen in relation to the fact that if any two partners were completely "com­patible" their marriage would become intolerably dull. Within the limits of what can be endured together, incompatibility provides a source of mutual interest, and a challenge to con­tinued mutual exploration rather than an excuse for writing it off as hopeless. The good counselor may help the partners to learn to accept each other's different feelings and attitudes, even the hostile ones; and each other's conduct within the law. At the same time one of them may learn to keep on contrib­uting what he can to the relationship, even when the other one seems to be doing very little about it.

b. Intolerance, indifference and inattention to the marriage relationship are put together because they are different ex­pressions of lack of the "goodwill" or the "we" feeling which is essential for happy marriage.

Intolerance, already mentioned, means a refusal to allow one's partner the normal autonomy or "self-government" which we have come to regard as an essential part of our democratic way of life. Of course there must be limits to tolerance, and refusal to allow such illegal actions as cruelty, theft, or adultery is not only justifiable, but an essential aspect of good partner­ship. But it is very common to find in marital disorders that one or both partners are trying to mold the other into an arbitrary kind of personality pattern, and being demanding and dictatorial about matters that are not essentially of com­mon concern.

These possessive dictatorial attitudes are often found to be signs of deep psychic insecurity and fear of being dominated, frustrated or humiliated, and in such cases they are neurotic attitudes which may need help. Sometimes intolerance is simply the "carry over" into marriage of a "spoiled child" atti­tude.

Intolerance may show itself in many different ways. There may be outbursts of temper, and aggressive demands with moodiness and sulking when they are not fulfilled. There may be "righteous indignation" with the conviction that it is pos­sible to hold another person up to his "moral obligations." There may be persistent nagging, "the chief weapon of the weak against the strong," or jealousy and bitterness. And there may even be suffering or illness for the purpose (gen­erally unconscious) of "blackmailing" the partner to conform to the person's wishes or demands.

Indifference may be described as lack of interest in the part­ner's welfare in all its aspects, attitudes, interests, doings, and in the partnership itself. This may arise from the feeling of being threatened in status or control, from preoccupation with selfish affairs, or from deeply imbedded individualism and self-centeredness. It may also be a result of despair about the mar­riage. The really self-centered are generally poor candidates for marriage unless they can see themselves to a sufficient ex­tent to develop beyond their self-worship. But they often get married in the blind assumption that all their needs will be met by a devoted partner, who is generally unaware of these great expectations and soon comes to rebel when they become ob­vious. Indifference is the true opposite of goodwill, just as hatred is the opposite of the emotional aspect of love. When marriage and the family are not given a high priority in the attitudes of both partners it is inevitable that their standards will drift into dull monotonous mediocrity or incessant wear­ing conflict.

Inattention to the marriage relationship is often an expres­sion of indifference, but it is just as often due to ignorance or immaturity. Young people do not always realize that love is a living quality, and that it therefore needs constant nourish­ment. It can only be nourished by being expressed and received, by word and gesture, by thoughtful kindly spontaneous ac­tions, and deepest of all through the mutual self-offering of a devoted sexual relationship. Marriage needs constant daily work from both partners if it is to be kept alive and fresh, and when the marriage and one's partner are "taken for granted" the marriage must suffer to some extent. Neglect from whatever cause throws a big strain on it.

c. Immorality includes much more than infidelity and adul­tery. It also includes such common enemies of partnership as dishonesty, untruthfulness, cruelty, mental as well as physical, extreme meanness and many other similar kinds of attitude and behavior. One of the essential obligations of people in any kind of partnership, even in business partnership, is that they should "play the game." This is equally true, though much less enforceable, in the marriage partnership, and although adultery is one of the most common grounds for divorce, many of the other kinds of immorality may be strong factors in marital disorder and breakdown. The situation is made more difficult by the fact that almost any kind of immorality is apt to lead to reactions on the part of the offended partner that may also extend to immorality. While there seems no reason why any wife or husband should have to put up with unlimited injury and insult, the fallibility of all human beings would seem to warrant a reasonable tolerance of both sides and a will­ingness to forgive in the realization of the fact that none of us is so without sin as to be fit to cast stones. Failure to forgive in this same sense may do as much harm to a marriage part­nership as many other kinds of immorality.

Perhaps it is worth reminding ourselves that although mar­riage is quite dependent on the quality of love that exists between the partners there are times and situations in which it is difficult if not impossible to love, at least in the "feeling" sense of the relationship. But fidelity, being a matter of the will, is possible to anyone with mature disciplined self-control, even though at times it may be difficult. To stand firmly together through the difficult times, even though it may seem to be "flying blind," and at the same time seeking help and giving it time to work, may be the real salvation of a marital disorder.

3.   SOME ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS WHICH CAN CONTRIBUTE TO MARITAL DISORDER

There is very substantial agreement among those who come into close contact with marital disorder that the intra-personal and inter-personal difficulties already considered, and possibly others related to them, are frequent factors in marital disorder. But it is becoming more and more realized that they do not explain nearly all of the marital disorders. Some American sociologists are asking whether these factors can adequately explain the high rate of marriage dissolution in the United States as compared with that in other countries.

For example—does the neighboring country of Canada, with only one fifth the divorce rate of the U.S.A., have such a high standard of personal fitness and so high a quality of personal relationships that only one fifth of their people, proportionately, are unfit for marriage? Does Britain, another industrialized country, have only one quarter proportionately of people unfit for marriage as compared with the United States, where the divorce rate is four times as great?

One must of course allow for differences in divorce legislation in any such comparisons, but the difference would seem to be more significant than the actual differences in legislation would account for. (And, of course, this very difference may be regarded as an environmental factor to be reckoned with in marital disorder.)

But we have also to consider the great increase in the divorce rate over the last half century in many countries, and to ask ourselves whether this could be explained by any comparable decrease in personal fitness for marriage or any comparable corruption in people's capacity for close personal relationships.

These interesting considerations have led to an increasing amount of concentration on the environmental factors, par­ticularly the sociological, in marital disorder, in the realization also that marriage is a living relationship in two-way inter­action with the environment, and therefore inevitably affected by it. The home and family in fact can be attacked by influ­ences from outside in the same way as people can be attacked by germs and other noxious agents from outside.

The environmental factors may be considered from the point of view of the different aspects of the marital environment, physical, personal, social and cultural, and spiritual.

a. Physical environment. Here we may think of such various influences as housing, neighborhood resources, financial ar­rangements, and equipment.

Cramped, uncomfortable and otherwise unsuitable housing, lacking in opportunities for desired privacy or in playing space for children, may well add greatly to the burdens of marriage, especially when there is ill health, fatigue or other reason for extra strain. Situations of this kind often have to be endured by young, newly married, often immature partners, who have had no opportunity to settle down properly together and forge a strong enough union to be able to bear these bur­dens; and it is all too easy for them to be brought to the point of despair as a result. This was particularly true during the post-World War II years.

Deficiencies in such neighborhood resources as shops, kinder­gartens, schools, churches, community centers, parks and other recreational facilities, lack of adequate transportation resources, and lack of such amenities as home help and baby sitters, may also add heavy burdens to a young couple compelled to live in such unsuitable areas because of the requirements of jobs or because of financial stringencies. Here again the situation is more difficult for people who have not had the opportunity to establish real partnership or to put down adequate roots in their community. Some rapidly developing "new housing areas" are taking these factors into more consideration in these days, but in other cases they are showing little evidence of so doing. The cramped apartment living in many large cities, with few available recreational amenities, would appear to provide many extra strains for marriage and family life. When children have only the streets to play on, and when the streets are ruled by some form of gangsterism, the community is breeding more and more delinquency for the future, as well as making marital disorder more frequent.

There are some financial factors which make for difficulty in marriage. Financial stringency can be a very heavy burden unless there are some reasonable expectations of relief. In some cases the financial stringency is the result of foolish spending on unnecessary things, or on gambling or drinking or even drugs in some cases, but then the marital disorder is more ap­propriately tackled from the point of view of the personality disorder behind the overspending. In other cases there are deep conflicts about the financial arrangements of the partnership, and often these are the expression of a deep emotional conflict which fastens itself on anything that can be used as a battle­ground. In these cases no great relief from the marital disorder is likely until this underlying emotional conflict, or this battle for emotional domination, is honestly faced.

It is an interesting and tragic comment on human nature that many marital disorders seems to be traceable to the fact of too much money as a factor in the trouble. Here of course it is not really the excess of money that causes the trouble but the immaturity, selfishness or similar personal disorder that makes it difficult to cope with excess wealth. The good counselor will try to help the partners to the achievement of some insight about these deeper elements of the problem.

Domestic furnishings and equipment have some part to play in the general comfort and "homeliness" of the living arrange­ments, and this is necessarily related with the financial resources of the couple, with the steadiness and permanence of the hus­band's and wife's jobs (which allow more indulgence in "time payment"), and also with questions of priority and agreement in what the available resources are to be spent on. Here again the real problem is often an underlying personal or relational one.

When these factors concerning the physical environment come up in counseling it is therefore the counselor's task to gain some idea of any underlying personal and relational factors that might have brought the housing, financial and other diffi­culties about, or might be making them persistent or destructive to the marriage. At the same time it may be possible to refer them to some available and suitable social agency which may be able to help in the crisis and to assist them to better ways of promoting their marital and family welfare.

b. The personal environment of marriage. This is a possible source of many marital difficulties. "Interfering in-laws," espe­cially when any of them live with or very near the partners, have been a well known source of trouble. The seductive charm of "the girl at the office" or "the man at the office" is also well known. Many a so-called "friend" has exerted a disruptive influence on a marriage partnership, and so have neighbors, job associates, "gangs," and other personal interferences.

But it seems clear that just as the resistance of the human body is an important factor in germ infection, so the "resist­ance" of the marriage relationship is an important factor in the marital "infection." When some personal interference is found to be an apparent causative factor in a marital disorder the counselor will generally have no contact with, and cer­tainly no influence, on the source of the interference, so he can then only help by trying to strengthen the "resistance" of the marriage to such attempts at interference.

For example, when a mother-in-law seems to be dominating one of the partners, the counselor can generally do nothing with her—even if it were regarded as the right way to deal with the situation, which is seldom if ever the case. The domi­nated partner, however, will need some help designed to bring insight into the reasons for allowing such domination, and the constructive ways of recovering the kind of mature autonomy which is necessary for a good adult partnership.

In many other cases of interference there is an underlying defect in the marriage which makes it, or one of the partners, vulnerable to such outside attractions or pressures. There may have been long and wearing conflict, lack of attention to the marriage with indifference and neglect, persistent loneliness and monotony, or any other similar disease of the marriage. Sometimes such chronic disease, like disease in the human body, is "walled off" from everyday interaction, but yet it may gradually corrode the marriage and make it susceptible to any external destructive influence.

Another aspect of the personal environmental influences is the type of job being carried out by one or both partners. When there is inescapable job dissatisfaction it will inevitably have its influence on the marital relationship, as of course dis­turbed domestic relationships will have their influence on the quality and satisfaction of a person's daily work. It may be too that an inescapable job involves long or difficult hours, undue worry or strain, or prolonged absence from home. It may also make it impossible for a family to settle down for any length of time in one place because it entails constant moving from place to place. These difficulties add to the strains of domestic life, and may often be revealed during counseling. When the external difficulties cannot be altered it is then the task of the counselor to help the partners to work out possible ways of working better together within the limits laid down by these vocational necessities.

c. The social and cultural environment of marriage. Under this general heading we can profitably consider a large number of different external environmental factors which may con­tribute in a direct or in a very subtle way to marital discord and even disaster.

In general it may be said that the rapid change over the last half century in society, in culture, and not least in tech­nology, has possibly had as great an influence on marriage as on any other social institution. Most of the factors about to be described are linked closely with this rapid change. As already mentioned, marriage and family life cannot be unrelated to social realities, and rapid change will always bring periods of strain and conflict between old and new, and challenges to adaptation to the new situation. In such a close personal rela­tionship as marriage, with its deep emotional involvements, there are bound to be distressing tensions in the process.

One of the most radical and far-reaching of these changes has been the emancipation of women. Fifty years ago few women were trained to any kind of occupation that would make them financially independent, and it was rare for a woman to enjoy the social independence of a "bachelor's flat" in the middle of a big city. As a result wives were generally so dependent on their husbands that even if they suffered greatly in marriage they were compelled to make the best of it. Today almost all women are trained in some occupation through which they can be financially independent, and large numbers of single women, together with widows and divorced or "separated" women, live alone and carry on a full life with complete social acceptance. As a result of this great change there is no essential reason, except for the needs of children, why any woman should put up with continued cruelty or persecution in marriage. This emancipation is the social fulfill­ment of an ideal to which people have paid lip service for many centuries; the essential dignity of human personality, male and female, and it provides one of the greatest challenges to marriage.

The immediate result of the emancipation of women is that marriage has been raised to a higher status, an equal partner­ship carried on by mutual consent by two free autonomous people. At the same time it is inevitably more difficult, and demands more from the partners, than ever before. The great increase in the breakdown rate over the last half century is more probably due to the increased standard of marriage than to any great decrease in the competence and character of people.

This social change is something that no marriage counselor can or would wish to alter, but it has a vital effect on the whole work of helping to promote better marriage. Most im­portantly of all, it has brought a vital new need into the fore­front of human affairs: the need for first-class, comprehensive and universal preparation for marriage, from earliest childhood onwards. And marriage counselors are in the forefront of this great future social project, designed to help all people to become as fit as possible for the conduct of modern marriage, and so prevent so many of its disorders from happening. The other great effect on the work of marriage counselors is that it includes the consideration with each of the conflicting partners of the main essential conditions of such an equal partnership between free autonomous people. Many of them have inherited from their own upbringing an out-of-date concept of marriage as a male-dominated "autocracy" or dictatorship, and this un­critical assumption may be very difficult for some husbands to grow out of.

Another social factor in marital disorder is found in the prevailing social ideas, values, customs and practices in the community. Such matters as the current practices regarding "dating" and courtship, and the earlier age at which people tend to marry, may have much to do with later difficulties— especially when combined with the current tendency to indi­vidualism, which makes partnership more difficult and vulner­able when the partners feel frustrated in their desire to get more than they give. It is often difficult for people conditioned by the highly competitive acquisitive atmosphere of the busi­ness and even the professional world to reorient themselves to the mutual consideration and self-offering so necessary in marriage, unless they have been very strongly conditioned in this unselfish, habitual attitude. This may be one reason why many people who have proved their competence and even brilliance in the business or professional world have proved to be utterly incompetent as marital partners and parents.

At the same time our present way of life has led to much specialization and "compartmentalization," possibly necessary for efficiency in the many complex technicalities of modern life. But this has so far not been balanced by sufficient training in the arts and the humanities for full personal development. The result is a lessening of human communication in social contacts, and therefore a lessening in human understanding. This is often made worse by social conventions which separate the sexes, through which men and women form separate groups at social gatherings, and feel ill at ease in ordinary social dis­cussion, which therefore tends to be superficial and trivial.

In some countries also young people are forced to a separation between the sexes during the important school years, from the ages of five or six to as old as eighteen or twenty, which deprives them of some practice in the art of social rela­tionships to the possible detriment of their later spontaneity and self-control in friendship, courtship, mate-selection and marriage. Here again these factors are mainly relevant to the fuller preparation for marriage which is so necessary in our present situation.

At the same time as the lessening of emotional and intel­lectual communication between men and women there is a much greater "throwing together" of men and women in their daily work. As a result of this many a man or woman may have as many or more interests in common with colleagues and associates at work than with the partner at home. This of course need not happen if the partners set out to cultivate and practice common interests, but if they fail to forge bonds of this kind the shared interests with someone of the opposite sex outside the home may tend to compete with the marital rela­tionship and eventually destroy it.

Another important change in the social and cultural en­vironment is the development to universal availability of scien­tific contraception. This has completed the emancipation of women, and saved them from many unwanted pregnancies. Families have tended to become smaller, more "selective," and when young people have larger families it is generally because they want them. This makes for more contentment in the marriage partnership and has in many ways strengthened it.  (It has also made it possible for people to indulge in sexual intercourse outside marriage with much less fear of pregnancy, and this is always a potential or actual threat to the stability of marriage. At the same time the progress of medical science has greatly diminished the fear of venereal disease, and this has also increased the temptation to illicit sexual relationships.)

Parallel with these social and cultural changes of the twenti­eth century is the progressive concentration of more and more people in large cities, with all the drawbacks as well as the ad­vantages of urbanization. People of greatly different cultural and racial backgrounds are thrown into close social and cultural contact, and this is intensified by the vast growth of transport facilities.

This development has had many effects on marriage and family life. In the past young people mostly met and married partners from their own neighborhoods, and of reasonably similar cultural and racial background. Their respective par­ents also generally knew each other well, and the marriages began with fairly sound roots. In these days, however, young people often meet and marry partners from much more varied backgrounds and from much greater distances because of availability of public and private transport and of telephone communication. Their respective parents may not have even seen each other until the wedding day, and sometimes not even then, and the young people may well begin their marriage with practically no social roots. Their differences of culture, class, religion, or even race may seem of little account when they are "in love," but they all too often prove to be a very great handicap to the development of unity when the "glamor" has worn off in the grim realities of everyday living together.

Apart from such differences of family background there is also much greater likelihood in these days of unsound family backgrounds in one or both partners. This has been found by-many investigators to be one of the very common factors in marital disorder and breakdown. At the 1959 Annual Con­ference of the British Medical Association Dr. H. V. Dicks of London reported that he and his collaborators had studied 157 disturbed marriages, and compared their findings with a control group of happy marriages. In the maritally disturbed group the marriage partners were predominantly of high social status and education: four fifths owned their own houses or flats. Of 299 spouses, no fewer than 239 came from broken homes or homes with poor parental relations, where there was violence between the parents, temporary desertion, and so on. Only 4.2% of the spouses came from emotionally good homes.

In contrast, in the matched control group, 54.6% came from good homes. The 299 spouses showed few overt neurotic symp­toms, but disturbed parental relations in the home when the spouses weer children seemed very significant, and under cer­tain conditions the spouses seemed to enact a compulsive repeti­tion of their childhood experience. One of the conditions seemed to be their age. It seemed that marriages came to a crisis when the partners reached 35 or so, when the children were off to school. Dr. Dicks thought this mid-term crisis might be partly physiological (hormonal ageing), or partly the consequence of middle-class people having become isolated within the family group and demanding more of marriage and the family than they could give. (British Medical Journal, Sept. 26, 1959, page 567.)

In addition to its value in elucidating factors in marital dis­order, this and similar investigations provide much support for the view that any project which helps in the betterment of present day marriages will have many positive effects on mar­riages in the future, by equipping more young people with the emotional and personal resources for the achievement of a satisfactory marriage.

In some countries the marital situation has been made still more difficult because of much greater mobility of families than in earlier times, with greater difficulty in laying down roots to increase their solidarity in the face of the stresses and strains of modern urban life. New social organizations seem to be needed, and in many places are being created, to pro­vide better opportunities for family consolidation.

Much of this mobility arises from the necessity of earning a living in a country in which many jobs involve frequent change of domicile. In addition to these movements of neces­sity there are probably many which arise more from insatiable ambition than from necessity, in which social status is felt to depend on advancement and "success," and which must there­fore be pursued, whatever the cost. In such cases the disturbing factor is more personal than environmental.

Another fact of our time which has profound influence on marriage, as on almost every aspect of modern life, is the mass media—radio and television, the press, the cinema, the paper-back book, the magazine and the novel, the theatre, and modern mass advertising in all its intrusive channels. These, with their blatant and subtly suggestive emphasis on seductive charm and superficial "popularity," based on possessions and external appearance and posturing rather than on genuine warmth and goodwill, add greatly to the problems of young married people as they "come down to earth," often with pain­ful disillusionment.

The extent of the influence of mass-media communications in our culture is quite beyond assessment. There is no doubt that they provide a very subtle and painless form of brain washing, repeated day after day from the time when a child is first able to comprehend to the time of senility or death.

The fact that other victims of the brain washing reiterate the superficial ideas gives a kind of "feed-back" quality to the original ubiquitous influence, increasing its effect to a still more alarming extent.

The total effect on marriage of the persistent emphasis on sensuality, or gratification of appetite and other forms of self-centeredness, and on the superficial emotional aspects of human relationships, is yet unmeasured. But one apparent aspect of this is the molding of people into a cultural pattern in which competitiveness and conformity seem to go hand in hand, in which a significant part of our western culture has been drawn from the "tradition directed" and the much more civilized "inner directed" influence to the "other directed" attitudes which would convert human communities to something com­parable with flocks of sheep. The terms have been borrowed from David Riesman's book "The Lonely Crowd" (Doubleday, 1953)

Another effect of this enormous growth of the mass media is the more general acceptance of the idea of divorce, with much less associated sense of failure and guilt. This has pro­found effects on marriage and family life. One of its con­sequences is that people tend increasingly to marry, thinking of marriage as some kind of trial partnership, which can easily be scrapped if it fails to "work out." This constitutes a threat to "the sanctity of marriage," in that people then tend to marry with much less sense of responsibility and more from "gratifi­cation of appetite." The result must be increasing incidence of marital failure if it is not faced and dealt with by better education and preparation for marriage and parenthood. This is a much more constructive way than trying to prevent divorce in cases where a marriage has obviously broken down beyond hope of repair. On the credit side of acceptance of divorce is the attention given to protection of children from the strains of parental divorce, which may help them in their eventual marriages.

With the increasing acceptance of divorce there is also an increasing social and even political acceptance of "de facto" wives, which tends to add to the disorganization of marriage, however "expedient" it may be in any particular case. It is not the counselor's business to moralize or to interfere in any such relationship, but rather to help to promote better harmony for those who seek his help, whatever may be the kind of marital relationship they may choose to participate in. In some cases however the interests of the rejected wife or husband may be helped by inviting consideration of the ulti­mate possibilities of what the "de facto" partners are con­templating, but this can only be done in an atmosphere of acceptance and permissiveness, unless the counselor is deter­mined to exceed his prerogatives.

At the national level the creation of what has been called "The Welfare State" may have striking effects on marriage. In Australia, for example, where pensions and social benefits have increased over the years to the point of reasonably work­able social security, the institution of pensions for "deserted wives" seems to have brought about a great increase in the number of deserting husbands. It would appear that many of these deserting husbands have been "encouraged" to leave by the knowledge that their wives will be assisted by the Govern­ment, and this is already constituting a serious problem for the Government social welfare organizations.

Behind all of these social and cultural changes of our time there is the constant menacing threat of overwhelming world conflict, following on the two great world wars and the uneasy peace that occupied the years between them. The revolutionary discoveries of atomic physics and the increasing conquests of space, together with the astronomical expenditure on these things and on defense, have also had their effects on marriage. Among other effects are those consequent on the enormous expenditure on defense, which involves heavy taxation and the diversion of manpower into fields that are unproductive when considered against housing and other social amenities. The general unrest, a product of incessant underlying anxiety, has probably made for more nervousness and less flexibility in domestic relationships. It may be that the human race will have to live with these difficulties for some time to come, and this is also a challenge to marriage, which at its best can provide the best of all havens of peace for the "recreation" of tired strained personalities.

d. The spiritual environmental factors in marital disorder. What might be called "the spiritual climate of marriage" has a very profound (but not easy to describe) influence on marriage, and in trying to give some account of it one must consider not so much the spiritual attitudes of the partners, as the general spiritual attitudes of the community.

It seems reasonable, at the risk of superficiality, to suggest that such spiritual values as love, generosity, and consideration have been to some extent replaced by utilitarian values and matters of expediency. This is not to underestimate the gener­osity of millions of people in the face of calamity and need, and the unassuming "good neighborliness" of people every­where. But many of the disorders of marriage stem from the fact that partners allow selfish interests to take priority over the mutual interests of the partnership, the family, and the wider interests of the community. One reason for this in many cases is that they have grown up in a spiritual climate in which the values that are most essential to sound marriage and family life are largely ignored or even discredited. When children are brought up wisely, fully aware of the love of two parents who  love  each  other  and  accept  each  other—even  when the parents do not "understand" each other—the children yet receive the most essential spiritual nourishment for the growth of their own personalities. Such outgoing unselfish love, which radiates outward also from the family into the community, can only be sustained and deepened when it is continually nourished through some adequate kind of worship, whether this be according to conventional patterns or not.

In many ways the Church has lost some of its leadership in the community to secular organizations, and it has all too often failed to rise to the newest needs of the community. For example, its general emphasis on the indissolubility of mar­riage would seem to imply a sacred obligation to take a much more vigorous lead in the community towards better prepara­tion for marriage. At the same time such leadership in the promotion of better home and family living would constitute the greatest possible contribution that could be made in these days towards the prevention of mental illness, and such "social illness" as delinquency, vandalism and crime. If it be true that the most influential of all known and controllable causes of mental and social illness is the deprivation of the right kind of love and security in childhood in the home, then the Church has a greater potential contribution to this great social project than any other body, the medical profession included.

This would seem to call for full consideration at the high­est level—offering one of the greatest opportunities for united creative leadership that has ever been open to the Church.

There are many signs of growing interest and greater co­operation between the different branches of the Church, in what could be the most effective evangelistic opportunity of all time, the strengthening of the home life of the nation.

When the family is strengthened in these different ways it will soon recover much that has been lost with regard to its vital work of preparing people for future marriage. The homes of the future are in a very real sense being made or marred in the homes of today. With the recovery of family tradi­tions the family itself will provide, as it used to do, some of the most influential and enduring preparation for sound mar­riage, and the influence will go on into the next and still more of the future generations.

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