the secret of success. This leads them to ask for
help, for insight, and to become fact-seeking with a frankness that
seems to be their most marked characteristic. They have not been led
into this attitude by any influence from their elders; they have
acquired it from their own realistic approach to the marriage problem,
which they clearly see has more emotional meaning than anything else
that is likely to come to them through choice during their lifetime.

This request for help by young people in courtship, in engagement, in
their first years of marriage, and when they plan to assume parenthood,
cannot be met merely by words of caution. They do not welcome just being
told what they should not do. What they seek is positive assistance.
They do not want advice, but they want information and insight. They
have become convinced that there are facts about marriage that people
have learned through experience, especially through the searching of the
scientists, and they ask that they be given the advantage of this
knowledge.

These young men and women do not take kindly to a marriage program which
merely lists the qualities that one ought to find in one's mate. Even
from a very little courtship experience they come to realize that one
does not desire to marry abstract virtues, however desirable, but a
flesh-and-blood person whom one desperately wants. What they seek is a
guidance which will keep them from wanting the kind of person they
should not marry. They expect to fall in love, but hope to escape
immature, untrustworthy emotions. They want to make a grown-up choice or
at least to pick a mate in whose fellowship they can develop the
character they know they need to achieve happiness.

First of all they ask for information that will help them make good use
of their courtship opportunity. They rightly feel that if they blunder
in this period, there is little hope of their making their goal later.
They have grown suspicious of a strong feeling of attachment, because
they have been forced to see in the experiences of many of their friends
that this has not guaranteed later happiness. They expect to have sooner
or later an overwhelming impulse to join their life to that of another
human being, and they ask:

"How can I protect myself from giving my affection to the wrong person?
How can I learn when it is safe to trust my own strong emotions? I know
I shall be just as others are, unable to hold back, blind to the other's