MODERN MARRIAGE

Taranaki Daily News, 24 August 1931, Page 13

MODERN MARRIAGE

PROBLEMS OF TO-DAY. CAUSES OF DISCORD. “The rules which, in past years, were presumed to govern the marriage con.trapt are to-day being questioned and challenged,” declared the Rev. J. R. Blanchard, when addressing the Round Table at the Y.M.C.A. in Wellington.

‘‘lt cannot be said that modern marriage is..any more successful than that pf former days,” he continued. “Divorce does not bear the stigma to-day that it once did. The prevalence of divorce is creating a certain atmosphere which is provoking people ‘to give it a *go.’”

The fact that women had won their economic independence had had a great deal to do with the problems of modern marriage. The marriage of such u woman was different from that of women'of an earlier age. In a case where the woman continued to work after marriage the marriage was not orjy a partnership, but became a purse partnership.- If the wife earned more teian the husband, there was likely to be discord. Then the question of children had to be solved, because obviously a woman could not hove children and earn a living. Lt was there that birth control entered, and induced a furtive element into the relationship between husband and wife. A woman who had been in business life, with its companionships, when she married and settled down in, perhaps a two-roomed flat, in which she could do all the work required in two hours, had plenty of time to think over the times when she had had a lavish supply of poeket money and this again led to discord. “More people get into mischief through being bored than from any other cause,” observed Mr. Blanchard.