Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

MARRIAGEirritations of marriage, lose sight of the central facts whichcan only be seen when one stands some way off and looksat one's life as a whole; they are temptedto admit a failurewhere at another moment they would claim a greatsuccess. There is a yet more fundamental source of difficulty.So few peopleare aware of the nature of the satisfactionthat may reasonably be found in marriage. Theyfail to realize that marriage is but life in miniature, andthat if married life were all easy and all pleasant, it wouldbe but a feeble image of the world and would fail to yieldthe deepest satisfaction that the world can give to thosewho have drunk deeply of life.We must, therefore, at least make the attempt to putthe question on a statistical basis, even though we cannotsecure an absolutely precise answer. Katharine Davis,assuming (though the statement may need some qualification)that "the sex relationship indisputably plays themajor part" in marriage, found that among one thousandpresumably normal married women 872unequivocallyaffirmed that their married lives were happy; 116 wereeither partially or totally unhappy, incompatibility beingthe chief cause; only 12 failed to answer.Dickinson, among his gynecological patients who cannotbe assumed to be so normal as Katharine Davis's subjects,found a somewhat smaller proportion of satisfiedwomen; he concludes that 3 in 5 among one thousandpatients were "adjusted," in the sense of being at least"without complaint" of their married life. In compositionthe two groups of "adjusted" and "maladjusted" were notmarkedly different; they were of similar social and economicstatus; at some period about two-thirds in bothof auto-eroticclasses had had considerable experiencepractices; the adjusted were slightly more fertile than theother group; but the chief general difference seems to be