by Elsie Lincoln Benedict
Available in 98 free installments
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¶ Despite the fact that these are the most vital problems pertaining to human happiness and that every individual's life depends for its glory or defeat, joy or sorrow upon the right settlement of them?they are two of the most neglected.
¶ Our divorce courts are full of splendid men and women who are there not because they are weak or wrong, but because they stepped into nature's age-old Instinct trap without realizing where it would lead them.
These men and women who pay so heavy a price for their ignorance and blindness are not to blame. Most of them have been taught that to be legally bound together was sufficient guarantee of marital bliss.
But experience has shown us that there are certain kinds of people each individual can associate with in harmony and that there are those with whom he could never be happy though a hundred ministers pronounced them mated for life.
¶ But the time is coming when we will select our mates scientifically, not merely sentimentally. It is also coming when we will know what every child is fitted to do by looking at him, just as we know better today than to set a shepherd dog on the trail of criminals or a bloodhound to herd sheep.
¶ Instead of beclouding the significance and the sanity of life's great quest; instead of encouraging every manner of mismating as we do today, we will some day arm our children with knowledge enabling them to wisely choose their life work and their life mate.
¶ The fact that Dolly has a dimple may make your senses whirl but it is not sufficient basis for marriage. There are things of vastly greater importance, though of course this does not seem possible to you at the time.
¶ And though Sammy sports a smile the gods might envy, he may not be the right man for Dolly. Even a smile that never comes off, great lubricator that it undeniably is, is not sufficient foundation for a "till-death-do-us-part" contract.
¶ When we hear of a divorce we assume that it was caused by the inability of those two people to agree upon fundamentals. We suppose that they found within themselves wide divergences of opinion, feeling or attitude regarding really worth while questions?social, religious, political or economic. We are inclined to imagine that "the little things" should take care of themselves and that only the "big things" such as these should be allowed to separate two lives, once they have been joined together.
¶ Yet the exact opposite is what happens, according to the divorce records of the United States.
These records show that divorces do not arise out of differences in what we have always called the big things of life, but out of those things which we have always called the little ones.
¶ We do not expect a husband or wife to change his religion and take on his partner's faith. We imagine this is an inherent thing more or less deeply imbedded in him and not to be altered, while we consider it only fair and right for John to give up his favorite sport, his hobby and some of his habits for Mary's sake.
At the risk of shocking the supersensitive, it must be admitted that most individuals get their religious leanings from external sources?parents, teachers, ministers, friends and especially by the accident of being born in a certain country, among a certain sect or within a certain community.
On the other hand, one's preferences in the matter of diversions are born in him, part and parcel of his very being and remain so to the end of his life. Accordingly, just as it is easier to change the frosting on a cake than to change the inside, it is easier to change a man's religion than to change his activities.
¶ Most of the divorces granted in America during the past ten years have been demanded, not on grounds dealing with the so-called fundamentals, but for differences regarding so-called unimportant things. And more than seventy out of every hundred divorces every year in this country are asked for on grounds pertaining to diversion.
