Marriage by the Book

The eighth annual Conference on Conservation of Marriage & the Family did the best it could. But it just didn't seem to have the answers. Not since the college marriage course was started at the University of North Carolina in 1927 had collegiate marriage counselors had as little counsel to offer as in Chapel Hill, N.C. last week.

A few brass tacks were strewn by Mrs. Evelyn Millis Duvall, director of Chicago's Association for Family Living, reporting on "Marriage in a World at War." Said she: "There is more money being made now; there is the psychological urge to crowd in a lot of living in a crisis. . . . The boom [in marriage] is on. . . . Young people want to know what to do: marry in haste and face a long separation, or wait and maybe never get married at all."

Having interviewed thousands of soldiers, Mrs. Duvall came out just where she went in: about half "think marriage is not fair to the girl and the other half think that marriage will give them more to fight for." Biggest problems in soldiers' marriages, she found, are: 1) separation; 2) lack of a home for the bride; 3) babies (going home to mother is often unsatisfactory because "most parents disapprove of war marriages").

Observing that "a good counselor doesn't try to tell anybody what to do but merely tries to help him find his own answer," Mrs. Duvall nonetheless hinted that marriage counselors were not quite so sure as they had been in peacetime that marrying in haste is a thoroughly bad thing. Said she: "There is ... the attitude everywhere that 'we might as well have what we want while we can have it.' "

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