SOME psychologists, taking a new look at the institution of marriage, are voicing shocking predictions for the near future. Indeed, in their professional eyes, the trend toward obsolescence of the marriage custom has already started, and is gaining momentum!
Astonishing?
Yes, indeed! But marriages are not only breaking down all around us; the very usefulness and desirability of the custom is being seriously questioned!
Is marriage on the way out, after all these generations and centuries? Is the home, and family life, to disappear from human society?
Incredible?
Articles voicing this trend of thought are appearing more and more frequently in magazines and newspapers.
Predictions are appearing in print that marriage soon may not be the socially required way for sexual union. Premarital pregnancies are on the upsurge, coincident with an increasing tendency toward public acceptance, and a decreasing sense of stigma.
But does marriage, after all, serve any necessary purpose?
To many that may sound like an absurd and foolish question. We take marriage for granted. Children growing up in a normal home with parents, probably brothers, sisters, or both — other children in similar families in homes all around them — assume naturally that they will be married some day. No one, in such circumstances, fifty years ago, would ever have thought of questioning marriage as an institution. No one, then, would have asked, even in the secret recesses of his own thoughts, whether or not the state of marriage was desirable for society.