The primary cause of the failure of marriage is that compatible persons do not have an opportunity to get together in the first place. Marriage has broken down or is breaking down because we are trying to make the social machinery by which engagements could be effected in village life function in an urbanized world, and are trying to make the conventions and mores of a patriarchal, proprietary marriage system work in an age when marriage is based on romantic love and the free will of the individual. This may be more clearly expressed by saying that modern society places upon every individual the responsibility of seeking someone of the opposite sex who fulfills his ideal, and then puts every conceivable obstacle in the way of his finding such a person.

The chief of these obstacles is found in the social conventions and mores which make it difficult for acquaintance to be established between the sexes. In urban life, where one may find himself “all alone in a crowd,” the range of acquaintances even within one’s own sex may be limited enough. Then add all the social barriers that prevent easy acquaintance between opposite sexes and you have the reason why some strangely incompatible specimens are found united in wedlock. The number of persons from among whom one is expected to select a mate for a whole lifetime is far less than the range of choice of friends within the same sex, who may come and go and are not considered so vital to happiness. And the effect of this is seen in the fact that friendships on the whole are more spontaneously successful than marriages. Of course, one may seek an easy explanation for this difference in the fact that friendship is a less complicated experience than marriage, which is true, but this does not account for the fact that even when the comparison is limited to the field of ordinary interests and temperament, apart from sex, friendships show a striking superiority to marriages.

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