LONG ENGAGEMENTS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 21 August 1926, Page 17

LONG ENGAGEMENTS.

OR MARRIAGE WITH MIDDLE AGED. It is rather paradoxical that after all the boasted speeding-up of life, the hustle, the labour-saving arrangements, the swiftness of travel, speech and sound, one such important thing should have been left very much as it was before—if anything, retarded for the majority of people. No one has invented a quick way of getting married if one has got no money to get. married on, and long engagements are the rule rather than the exception to-day, while the marriage age is quite undoubtedly later than it was a hundred years ago. A number of people there arc, naturally, who can afford to get married directly they find someone they think they would like to marry, and that gives rise to many observations on the hastiness of young people of the modern world. The modern parent might be congratulated, howevdr, on his or her attitude towards the romantic elopement nowadays. That must have been the end of "many threatened long engagements, and the end of much happiness. The modern girl realises that a benignant papa does not stand at the end of every honeymoon, so to speak, chequebook in hand. One cannot take the cash in hand and waive the rest. In most cases it is not even there to take, and papa knows that, nowadays a girl who runs away and marries a man in the teeth of parental disapproval must; either see that her husband supports her or help to support him. Feminine helplessness in a hard world does not carry much conviction nowadays. If it were left to the young man it would probably be just as it ever was, for the young man of to-day is quite as romantic and head-in-airish as his predecessor. The long engagement is Ihe modern girl's compromise with a hard fate that decrees either a longwait for a young man or an immediate marriage with a middle-aged one. And although most parents do not view with cheerfulness an engagement of two years for their daughter, most of them know better than to make open protest and are too fond of their children to make it even harder for the young couple. .So many of the drawbacks to the long engagement has disappeared that in the modern way it is not nearly such an ordeal as it once might have been,

Chaperonago of engaged couples has gone much the same way as chaperonage of the unengaged. Probably both of them are doing some work outside their homes. They may even bo working together, and when they sec each other it docs not mean that he is neglecting his work for her. They have earned the right to see each other, and tliov have earned tbo money with which to do it.—Manchester Guardian.