Abstract

What Is Happening to Marriage?

The proper outlet for sex, as Americans saw it, was marriage. And that was a new notion. Marriage, as it had been practiced for many thousands of years, had not been looked upon as an outlet for sex. It had been, in fact, a negation of sex desire. When man moved out of the family and began to live in the machine, matrimony began to lose its holiness. As the institution of the family went down and down, matrimony became less and less important. Today it trails along with churchgoing and Sabbath observance as a force in human life. The first step in its downfall was the attempt to exalt the sex longings to first place in human affairs: that is, to make matrimony an affair of the heart instead of an institution for the subordination of individual instincts to the common good.