The choice of a mate.

  • Anthony Ludovici
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details
    71/546 page 41
    BREACH-OF-PROMISE ACTIONS Finally reference must be made to a certain English legal provision and its bearing upon the choice of a mate. Most civilizations seem to have provided for a period during which each party to a marriage contract could take careful measure of the other and determine whether the other could be tolerated as a permanent mate. But in England a legal process, differing in certain particulars from any other system of law, defeats the object of this probationary period. I refer to actions for breach of promise. Since every available means should be used to find out as much as possible about the mate, a period of engagement seems admirably suited to provide the necessary opportunities for mutual trial and scrutiny. If, however, at the end of such a period it is impossible, without the risk of an expensive lawsuit and possibly heavy damages, to come to the negative of the only two conclusions which lend some sense to the interval after betrothal, and if it is safe only to confirm the choice made before opportunities for close acquaintance and scrutiny occur, the engagement period becomes merely a fruitless, formal delay of marriage. To reply that young people should know their own minds before they become engaged, is to forget that in a well-ordered household they are not allowed private and constant association with each other and each other’s families before the engage ment. In the working classes, where the “ walking out ” period provides for intensive mutual scrutiny, breach of promise actions are rare. But in the middle-classes the engagement period really provides the first chance of becoming better acquainted. In France and Germany, where breach of promise has not the consequences it may have in England, a foolish convention makes it almost as difficult to break off an engagement. This is the stigma which is supposed to attach to the parties, or to one of the parties, concerned. In a book of remarkable essays, from which I shall often quote, no less than four contributors—Professor Friedlander, Dr. Fricke, Dr. Lorentzen and Dr. Julius Kleeberg—independently call attention to this, plead for a more rational attitude to broken engagements, and cogently argue that the utility of engagements in view of the above, expect me to join in the popular parrot cry in favour of “ unselfish ” love, or of “ unselfishness ” in the spouse. And I hope that my failure to allude to such spurious desiderata will not be felt as a serious lack. C* 41
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