Love and Marriage : Life, Love, and Family Health : The Encyclopedia of Man, Woman, and Child

Ideally — and, fortunately, very often in practice — love and marriage are one and the same thing. Love is the prelude to marriage but, if the marriage is to be a complete success, it should be accompanied by love. For although the loveless marriage need not be a tragedy, as so many suggest, it is a poor substitute for the marriage that carries with ‘until death us do part’, the mutual it love that first brought the two partners together. What makes so many marriages fall apart is the fact that the love between man and woman upon which it is based is in turn based upon sex, one of the two primeval and strongest instincts in Man. The other, of course, is the will to live. So insistent is Nature that the human race should survive that she has provided us with a sex instinct which can play havoc with our lives and those of all around us unless we realize at a very early stage that we possess this potent instinct, and that one of the secrets of successful living is being able to bring it under control. If we thus make it our servant — and not allow it to become our master — we have gone a long way to making a success of life. What this means in practice, as is admirably brought out in this book, is that we must recognize our sexuality. To attempt to deny it is as wrong as to attempt to abuse it. We are sexual animals, but we are also human beings, and in the recognition of this duality in our nature - to use a term beloved of the philosophers lies the secret of a full, enjoyable and — happy life. The sexual instinct may at times seem so overwhelming as to be uncontrollable but, as mankind has learned - often at great cost throughout the ages, it is the controlled instincts that produce the greatest pleasures of life. Like so many lessons, it is one that almost every generation has to relearn in so far as the tendency of youth is to think that it knows better than its parents. Fortunately, for most of us, this great delusion dies out fairly soon, and we learn, sooner rather than later, that there is much to be learned from the accumulated wisdom of the ages. At the present time, this problem is accentuated by the necessity for restricting the rate at which the world population is growing. The fundamental problem here is that the purpose of sexuality is reproduction. If we separate the sexual act from reproduction, we are introducing a complication which Nature did not foresee. To the man this may not make much difference, but to the woman it does, no matter how superficially modern she may pretend to be. Fundamentally, a woman has sexual intercourse in order to become pregnant and produce a child. The desire for motherhood may vary tremendously, but it is there all the time, and to deny it is to shut one’s eyes to the hard facts of life. This, of course, is asking for trouble. Suppressed facts always cause trouble. The problem today - and it is a perfectly soluble one, as hundreds of thousands of happy marriages testify — is how to ensure a happy and contented married life, with both partners obtaining the maximum joy and pleasure from sexual intercourse, but with only a very limited number of pregnancies ensuing. What form of birth control is used is one for the married couple to decide for themselves on the basis of the information provided in this book, supplemented, if necessary, by advice from their family doctor. Equally important today is the problem of the infertile marriage. Here modern medicine can do much to convert such a marriage into a happy fertile one, but there is one fact that tends to be overlooked today when so many people expect so much from medicine. The childless marriage need not be a tragedy. The man and wife who, in spite of full investigation and treatment, have had to accept the fact that they cannot have children of their own, should bear in mind that there are successful alternatives to natural motherhood and fatherhood. These are but a few of the many aspects of love and marriage that are dealt with authoritatively and simply in this volume. The secret of success in such fundamental matters cannot be condensed into a few words but, if one sets out on the voyage through adult life imbued with the right ideas and the correct facts, the course of married life is much more likely to be the exhilarating experience which it has proved to be for so many in the past. William A. R. Thomson, M.D.