I hear the worldly and cynical rail at the blindness of "young love," and I can see the truth in what they say; but also I can see the deeper truth in the magic dreams of the young soul. Here is a youth who adores a girl, and you know the girl, and it is comical to you, because you know she is not any of the things the youth imagines. But who are you that claim to know the last thing about a human soul? Look into your own, and see how many different things you are! Look back, if you can, to the time when you were young, and remember the visions and the hopes. They have lost all reality to you now; but who can say how many of them you might have made real if there had been one other person who believed in them, and loved them, and would not give them up? I write this; and then I think of the other side--the fools that I have known in love! The trusting women, marrying rotten men to reform them! The pitiful people who think that fine phrases and sentimentality can take the place of facts! I implore my young couples to sit down and face the realities of their own natures, to decide what they are, and what they want to be--and if there is going to be any change, let it be made and tried out before marriage! I implore them to begin now to control their desires by their reason and judgment; to begin, each of them at the very outset, to carry their share of the burdens and do their share of the hard work. I implore them to value independence and self-reliance in the other, and never above all things to marry from pity, which is a worthy emotion in its place, but has nothing to do with sex, which should be an affair between equals, a matter of partnership and not of parasitism. I think that, on the whole, the most dreadful thing in love is the use of it for preying, for the securing of favors and advantages of any sort, whether by men or by women. CHAPTER XLII EDUCATION FOR MARRIAGE (Maintains that the art of love can be taught, and that we have the right and the duty to teach it.) I assume now that our young couple have definitely made up their minds, and that the wedding day is near. They are therefore, both the man and the woman, in position to receive information as to the physical aspects of their future experience. This information is now for the most part possessed only by pathologists--who impart it too late, after people have blundered and wrecked their lives. The opponents of birth control ask in horror if you would teach it to the young; I am now able to answer just when I would teach it; I would teach it to these young couples about to marry. I would make it by law compulsory for every young couple to attend a school of marriage, and to learn, not merely the regulation of conception, but the whole art of health and happiness in sex.