Family background also plays an important rold in marital disorders

Parallel with these social and cultural changes of the twentieth century is the progressive concentration of more and more people in large cities, with all the drawbacks as well as the advantages of urbanization. People of greatly different cultural and racial backgrounds are thrown into close social and cultural contact, and this is intensified by the vast growth of transport facilities.

This development has had many effects on marriage and family life. In the past young people mostly met and married partners from their own neighborhoods, and of reasonably similar cultural and racial background. Their respective parents also generally knew each other well, and the marriages began with fairly sound roots. In these days, however, young people often meet and marry partners from much more varied backgrounds and from much greater distances because of availability of public and private transport and of telephone communication. Their respective parents may not have even seen each other until the wedding day, and sometimes not even then, and the young people may well begin their marriage with practically no social roots. Their differences of culture, class, religion, or even race may seem of little account when they are “in love,” but they all too often prove to be a very great handicap to the development of unity when the “glamor” has worn off in the grim realities of everyday living together.

Apart from such differences of family background there is also much greater likelihood in these days of unsound family backgrounds in one or both partners. This has been found by-many investigators to be one of the very common factors in marital disorder and breakdown. At the 1959 Annual Conference of the British Medical Association Dr. H. V. Dicks of London reported that he and his collaborators had studied 157 disturbed marriages, and compared their findings with a control group of happy marriages. In the maritally disturbed group the marriage partners were predominantly of high social status and education: four fifths owned their own houses or flats. Of 299 spouses, no fewer than 239 came from broken homes or homes with poor parental relations, where there was violence between the parents, temporary desertion, and so on. Only 4.2% of the spouses came from emotionally good homes.

In contrast, in the matched control group, 54.6% came from good homes. The 299 spouses showed few overt neurotic symptoms, but disturbed parental relations in the home when the spouses weer children seemed very significant, and under certain conditions the spouses seemed to enact a compulsive repetition of their childhood experience. One of the conditions seemed to be their age. It seemed that marriages came to a crisis when the partners reached 35 or so, when the children were off to school. Dr. Dicks thought this mid-term crisis might be partly physiological (hormonal ageing), or partly the consequence of middle-class people having become isolated within the family group and demanding more of marriage and the family than they could give. (British Medical Journal, Sept. 26, 1959, page 567.)

In addition to its value in elucidating factors in marital disorder, this and similar investigations provide much support for the view that any project which helps in the betterment of present day marriages will have many positive effects on marriages in the future, by equipping more young people with the emotional and personal resources for the achievement of a satisfactory marriage. In some countries the marital situation has been made still more difficult because of much greater mobility of families than in earlier times, with greater difficulty in laying down roots to increase their solidarity in the face of the stresses and strains of modern urban life. New social organizations seem to be needed, and in many places are being created, to provide better opportunities for family consolidation.

Much of this mobility arises from the necessity of earning a living in a country in which many jobs involve frequent change of domicile. In addition to these movements of necessity there are probably many which arise more from insatiable ambition than from necessity, in which social status is felt to depend on advancement and “success,” and which must therefore be pursued, whatever the cost. In such cases the disturbing factor is more personal than environmental.

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