The great social need in the United States is for means of
acquaintance and friendship for the young in lines of association in
which a safe and helpful marriage choice may be made. William Penn
said, "Never marry but for love, but see that thou lovest what is
lovely." The effort of all social arrangements for the young in
families where the elders do not try to reinstate parental control but
rather to give a chance for safeguarded independence of choice is to
bring together young people who should find, each one of them in that
group, a chosen one of the right sort. Financial capacity, mutually
congenial relatives, suitable age and similar tastes, after
acquaintance giving reasonable basis for hope for permanent agreement
in essentials, might insure suitable marriages. The many advantages of
close friendships within a group bound together by similar culture and
outlook is the real reason for "society." Often foolish in its ways
and defeating its own higher ends, it is yet a real effort to give a
new and more democratic guidance through favorable circumstances,
rather than through personal will or family rule, to the marriage
choice of youth.
The reason why one is chosen and another not is never clear to any but
the ones who make the choice. To them, indeed, it may be a mystery,
but one they are sure must have its source in the necessity of things.
To others it is often a puzzle past understanding because so many of
the friends of each of the twain "would have chosen so differently,
you know."
Something of racial need both for mixture and for persistency of type,
something of hidden demand of temperament for a complementary
personality, something of easy awakening of passion and easy holding
of attention, something of requirement for a larger sympathy than most
friends can give and the favored one seems able to supply--all these
enter into the selection of the chosen one from all the rest of one's
friends. The need is for as wide a range of personalities and for as
large a chance to make friends with the suitable and truly congenial
as can be given to youth in order that the choice may be really free
and the result happy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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