ndency that come with puberty. The
fact is, however, that our type of courtship largely results from using
the energy of this adolescent upheaval. There is a redirecting of the
forces that mark the awakening of puberty and then start flowing through
the entire personality. Courtship becomes a sublimation, as the
scientist says, a reshaping of this energy so that later there may be a
higher, more mature satisfaction of the desires that follow along with
this influx of new vitality, this strange, unexpected interest in
members of the other sex.

Undoubtedly modern youth face in this experience a greater ordeal than
did their parents. This comes about from changes in our way of living
and the effect they have had upon marriage, particularly upon our
expectations when we enter matrimony. In times past the economic
advantages of being married were so great and, as a rule, the struggle
of life was so hard, that there was no opportunity to overload marriage
with expectations and make its successes and its failures so exclusively
the satisfying or denying of emotions.

Of course our tendency is to ask too much of marriage. We demand that it
fulfill every purpose of the heart; thus some disappointment, once one
enters upon the career of marriage, is inescapable. The young man and
woman who have entered marriage expect to grasp much too soon the
happiness which their emotions demand. The imagination has such a free
range while romance runs at full tide that it would be strange indeed if
the imagination did not go far beyond the possibilities of any human
relationship.

This readjustment of expectation is what we mean by matrimonial
maturity. The young person who refuses to play the game of marriage,
just as soon as it appears that complete fulfillment of youthful wishes
is not to be had, cannot grow up and never comes to see that the greater
satisfactions must come out of self-discipline, emotional restraint, and
a love of response that does not ask what is beyond human achievement.
Not through a bringing to life of his rosy dreams of contentment, but in
a fellowship that deepens through the maturing of emotional life, must
one find the values of either marriage or family life.

* * * * *

Although the wise use of courtship is the most important preparation for
marriage happiness, it is not the only way we clarify and mature the
emotions in our efforts to be happily married. Engagement brings i