Comments on: “When You Marry”: 1962 Textbook

By: Blix

Blix — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 03:02:00 +0000

That first part makes me think that they did absolutely no research at all. It almost sounds like the start of ethnic cleansing, only class cleansing.

By: Carrie

Carrie — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 03:34:33 +0000

I lol’d.

By: Pauline

Pauline — Sat, 21 May 2011 20:09:53 +0000

I’ve been leaving through this book, and I think it’s actually quite good for its time.
The part that I found really funny was where they discuss whether you can still date other people or not if you are engaged (and the answer wasn’t completely negative!); I don’t think that’s something that’s considered acceptable nowadays, except for polyamorists.
Very interesting was a chapter called “Does morality make sense?”; it’s about premarital sex and I found it was not nearly as bad as it sounds.
It says that premarital sex is a problem precisely because society says so, and that because this is the societal norm, people who have premarital sex will generally feel guilty and ostracised.
This chapter also discusses the reasons there could be behind the idea of exclusive sex with only one person; the conclusion is that if you have random sex with anyone you’d like to, you’d have to shield yourself from getting emotionally attached to the people you have sex with, to prevent jealousy and broken hearts (which actually is the attitude adopted by a promiscuous guy I know). In the opinion of the writers of the book, sex is not worth that.

Anyways, IMO, this book is quite good, especially given its time. Most of the time, the writers seem open and non-judgemental, simply trying to give the advice which they think will benefit their readers the most.

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 19:07:50 +0000

I read that book years ago and it really hung with me. One part I remember was them keeping the TV in a central location of the living room when there was never going to be another transmission. Also so sad that the only kid he taught to read died at an early age and his life was over with no time to teach another. So the written language was lost to that group forever. And the hammer…talk about superstitious behavior!

By: Sunshine

Sunshine — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 14:49:47 +0000

The paragraph about first intimacy is an argument in favor of premarital sex. The awkwardness and guilt involved sounds like it should be worked out before marriage. Marriage is difficult enough to adjust to without having to worry about learning the basic mechanics of sex.

NOTE: I am not in favor of anyone having sex before they are mature enough to use birth control correctly and consistently. Young teenagers should be focused on school, not sex.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 21:31:07 +0000

Is what we are doing with our marriages today working? Isn’t what 90% of what this book says accurate? Sure, it’s creepy. But that’s because we send our children out into the dating world with very little advice.

It says women should never marry down. Sure, it sounds bad but women NEVER do.

By: Michael R. Brown

Michael R. Brown — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 06:10:18 +0000

The blogger/commenter here is snarky and annoying. Some folks find infinite depths of outrage and/or amusement at how increddddibly iggnorrant the 50s/early 60s were. Yeah, we know. It’s been ground away at for about 40 years. It’s worse and less than a cliche. I prefer to see things more contextually, while recognizing groping ignorance (or worse) of the time.

By: Kathleen

Kathleen — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 02:56:29 +0000

This is a minor point, but I think you should reconsider using those love graphs as examples of pointless graphs. Are they? I think they are more interesting (and actually, also, perhaps better at capturing something about reality) than most of the graphs we make these days…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 00:49:10 +0000

I could not agree with you more.
jLew

By: Football , Cricket, sports

Football , Cricket, sports — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 16:19:21 +0000

Pelé – 1958, 1962, 1966, 1970 FIFA World Cup Classic Players…

Very interesting post, I’ve added a Trackback to it from my blog :)…

By: Football and history

Football and history — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 08:57:11 +0000

Pelé – 1958, 1962, 1966, 1970 FIFA World Cup Classic Players…

Very interesting post, I’ve added a Trackback to it from my blog :)…

By: Squoo

Squoo — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:07:18 +0000

If the norm was men with experience coupling off with women without it, who were the men getting their experience _with_?
Seems like those few ‘bad’ women who broke the mold must have been pretty busy!

By: Village Idiot

Village Idiot — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:14:10 +0000

What would be the benefit of a short-term marriage?

Living in accord with reality would be one, at least for those who choose it. Get married for as long as you like; I’m not advocating term limits for everyone, just more options that reflect actual social trends instead of wishful thinking.

And those “benefits” you speak of are merely administrative paper shuffles that can be extended or re-written any way we like (though what actually happens is a function of political power). Withholding such “benefits” because of a perceived lack of contribution is exactly the old-school carrot-and-stick approach to imposing one group’s belief system (or BS for short) on another.

It might just be that so many older people are alone precisely because of traditional marriage; they got divorced very late in the game or their spouse died and since their whole life was centered around that one person they then end up on their own. The long-term commitments you speak of merely benefit you and your personal beliefs about what society should be like, and you’re free to swim upstream as long as you like though I don’t see how that’s supposed to benefit society at large; like I said, what I propose requires a bit of creative imagination and the status quo is a demonstrable (and expensive) failure, and I would include a couple who stayed married but hated every minute of it as a ‘failure’ too.

It’s like with prison; many people like the hard-line approach of ‘getting tough’ on crime and favor incarceration for perpetrators of victimless crimes (especially anything drug-related) even though the overall cost and damage to society is far greater with such an approach than if drug abuse was widely considered to be the medical (and not criminal) problem that it is. The reason we take one approach and not the other is that many people have a pathological need to arbitrarily impose their morals and ethics on others. Same goes for marriage; who cares if two men want to marry, for example, or for how long? No one else has to live in their house with them, yet so many feel the need to tell others how to live; maybe THAT is what’s eroding our social cohesion?

By: Alessandra

Alessandra — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 06:49:29 +0000

@b: What would be the benefit of a short-term marriage?

Obviously all the questions about marriage are hard to discuss in very short text blurbs. Having said that, although I totally agree that long-term marriage benefits individuals and society because many of the reasons you stated, it is also true that many long-term marriages are a failure in terms of the dynamics between the man and woman as a couple. Concerning this mass societal problem as well, I am in favor of a shorter marriage where the couple continues to be faithful and respectful of each other, rather than the model of being adulterous and a sham and remaining married “on paper” longer. Unfortunately, I don’t think there has been a lot of progress in the quality of relationships in marriage, whether short-term or long-term, now that we have such a high divorce rate. It may have even worsened, because the attitudes that go along with discarding the aims of a long-term marriage are usually harmful and disrespectful of the other person in the couple.

Lastly, I also don’t think that just because a marriage ended in divorce, that the entire relatioship is a “failure.” There are other factors to consider. Just as a marriage where people stay married all their lives but live a terrible or considerably flawed day-to-day relationship cannot be considered a success in my view.

By: b

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:19:10 +0000

What would be the benefit of a short-term marriage? “Real” marriages benefit society because the people commit to taking care of each other in circumstances under which otherwise society/taxpayers/etc would have to take care of them – when one loses their job, gets sick, becomes paralyzed, when they grow old and couldn’t live alone (this one is pretty big – most studies show that only about 10% of people in assisted living facilities are married). In return, they get some benefits from society, most of which directly relate to those circumstances (filing taxes together, being on each others’ health insurance, access to each other in the hospital, etc).

Why should society give those benefits to people who aren’t even pretending that they will stick it out long enough to benefit society in return?