Does Early Marriage Succeed?

• Are you and he emotionally mature?
• Do you know your rights and your duties?
• Can you manage your own affairs independently?
• Is marriage merely a material guarantee?

It is the subject of life itself, the headline of every day — can it, then, be settled in a single answer?... Were this subject debated among four people, each would come up with an idea contradicting what the others put forward.

The age of marriage sometimes differs according to the period of intellectual maturity in different people; but even if a person reaches bodily maturity in adolescence, does that justify early marriage?

This subject has been studied and debated by sociologists, yet all have failed to give the final answer — except that their consensus comes down to this: marriage after twenty has proved, at several stages, a success surpassing marriage before that age. And the latest statistics establish that marriage is being delayed in deference to the demands of cultural conditions and the ambition for higher learning.

Here a question occurs to the reader: what is wrong with early marriage? The problem has to do with emotional and intellectual maturity, and the cause of such a marriage's failure is the haste with which it is undertaken; for it often settles upon a flimsy foundation of sexual attraction rather than upon a solid love. Where is the period of testing that awakens in the soul the feeling that one cannot do without a certain person?

Then too, ideas and tastes differ between the age of sixteen and twenty: the girl of twenty-two does not choose what she herself might have chosen at eighteen. The other problem arises from the two parents-in-law with whom the girl must live if she marries a young man who has not arranged his future so as to be independent of his parents.

Emotional maturity is a stage that takes up the whole of life. It begins when the child learns how to love his mother; his love extends to his father, then to his relatives and friends. In the early morning of his life the child does not distinguish between the sexes, and may incline more toward his own sex; the adolescent's thoughts turn to the other sex, but without discriminating between one person and another, until his affection finally narrows and settles upon a particular individual, whom he picks out from among all. Thus emotional maturity is accompanied by a perceptible development — or it may halt in some people and remain fixed upon the mother, or it may scatter and never settle upon a particular person; and it may even carry a person back to a stage passed through some time before, as when a girl returns to her mother after her marriage, thereby proving her regression to childhood.

Full emotional maturity is not to be expected before the age of thirty, and development slows between thirty and forty; the best period for marriage is at twenty, since it is the period of gradual advance toward full adulthood.

How do you recognize maturity in yourself and in the one you have chosen to share your life? The best measure is to look with a detached eye at every trait and every action; then you know your rights and your duties, and you feel that you can act independently in your own affairs within the compass of your own thinking.

Before maturity a person is dependent, incapable of decision; then too he is selfish, fond of domination, and in all innocence lays the blame on others for a fault he himself has committed. For such people marriage becomes the embodiment of the awaited dream prince, for whose sake they stand against tradition, shutting their eyes to the essential things.

Marriage requires material competence. Students, or beginners in their careers, face years of striving for attainment, and they cannot

meet the requirements of a home and a family before securing something to lean upon — otherwise need overtakes them when they have made no reckoning for it. Nor do we mean by this that a person should marry only when he has secured his material life — for can he do without love? He must understand the woman who is to share his life, and take his time during this period in studying her consciously and in trying out their common possibilities; he must not decide at first glance that this is the girl of his dreams... For the first spark dies away, and the truth lying hidden behind it is soon laid bare; so he must plant that truth with the two hands of confidence and understanding. It is preferable that the engagement period be prolonged, so that the engaged pair may blend their inclinations and then look into what agrees and what conflicts in their lives; and the period may run from six months to a year.

There is also the planning of the life to come, and its requirements: will not the engaged couple, then, take their time to cast a glance ahead, and then walk with sure step along a well-fortified road?...