n He Comes A-Courting--Dr. Ernest R. Groves 1

II. Now That You Are Engaged--Dr. James L. McConaughy 13

III. Ought I to Marry?--Dr. Ellsworth Huntington 27

IV. Should Wives Work?--Eleanor Roosevelt 43

V. Learning to Live Together--Gladys Hoagland Groves 54

VI. Marriage Makes the Money Go--Elizabeth Bussing 66

VII. Children? Of Course!--Jessie Marshall, M. D 80

VIII. Detour Around Reno--Dr. Hornell Hart 97

IX. Sex Instruction in the Home--Frances Bruce Strain 111

X. Religion in the Home--William Lyon Phelps 126

XI. It Pays to be Happily Married--Stanley G. Dickinson 140

XII. The Case for Monogamy--Dr. Ernest R. Groves and Gladys H. Groves 154

_Dr. Ernest R. Groves_

CHAPTER ONE

_When He Comes A-Courting_

Never were American young people more conscious of the challenge of
marriage. They are not willing to accept the idea they have often heard
expressed by their elders that marriage is a lottery. Neither do they
believe that when they marry, they are given a blank check which permits
them to draw from the bank of happiness as they please. Instead, even
though they do not know how to go about it, they feel more and more that
there is something they need to do to give themselves a fair chance of
achieving success. A mere acquiescent waiting for Fate to come and lead
them into paradise is contrary to their spirit. They seek as best they
know how some way of finding their proper mate and some means of
becoming equal to the testing that even the most reckless of them in
their better moments realize that marriage is sure to bring.

This fact-facing of the marriage problem shows, more fully than anything
else could, how much our youth today are expecting from marriage. Even
those marriages that peter out and sink to a barren drabness started
out with high hopes, and, although the victims may not know what brought
about their mishap, they generally feel there was blundering somewhere
and that this need not have happened.

Some young people grow cynical because they are so familiar with
matrimonial failures; but most of them, even when they have noticed that
many of their friends are unhappily married, become more determined to
find, if they can,