Foreword

Before you marry, you face some of the most interesting questions of your lifetime. They are not all new to you. Ever since you were very young you have dreamed about the time when you would be grown up and getting married. During your first dates you probably secretly wondered what it would be like to be married to this one or that. When you began to go steady you got even closer to the questions of ongoing relationships with a one and only. And now you are closer to marriage than ever.

Been thinking seriously about marriage lately? Congratu­lations! You are embarked upon one of the most exciting and rewarding ventures ever undertaken. Like most voyages, this one will be more successful if you know what to expect and prepare for it. Just as you get road maps before taking a trip into unfamiliar territory, so you want now to look over the situation in marriage before taking the final step. That is just good common sense.

Perhaps you have experienced some unfortunate affairs in your dealings with the other sex that make you just a little anxious now that you are considering marriage. That is usual. All of us make mistakes. No one has a perfect score in love affairs or in anything else. The important thing is to recover from your past hurts and get things right before the really big test comes along. So now, especially at the threshold of marriage, you want to ask yourself some questions and get some straight answers.

Your questions will be uniquely yours. And you alone will have to face them. But through the years, other people like you have been asking themselves straight-from-the-shoulder questions as they approach marriage. Your author has brought together the questions that most frequently haunt couples before they marry. The one hundred and one ques­tions around which this book is written represent more than twenty years' experience with thousands of persons approach­ing marriage. They may not all be pertinent to you, but they are sure to include many of the questions that bother you most.

Not all of these questions have answers. There aren't any yes-or-no answers to many of life's biggest questions. Some­times there are not enough facts in yet from research and study to do more than point in the direction in which an answer might be found. Frequently a question can be an­swered rather definitely out of the scientific studies and clin­ical evidence that are available. Your author has translated these findings for you in ways that make sense in everyday living. Beyond that, he shares with you a rich background in the social sciences and religion, and a full life of happy married living.

This book may be helpful not only for those of you about to marry, but also for your counselors and leaders. Ministers who increasingly realize the importance of their role in solemnizing marriage will find in this book a comprehensive outline for premarital counseling. Physicians will be glad for suggestions for making their premarital examinations more personally helpful. Teachers, friends, and others may find substantial bases for their counseling insights within these pages. All who offer youth more than expressions of "good luck" and "best wishes," will welcome this step-by-step guide by a man who is richly experienced.

My husband, who wrote this book, and I were married in 1927. One of our first joint projects was leading a class of engaged couples at Belmont Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee. When I saw how much his gentle humor and rich store of wisdom meant to those young adults, I wanted many others to share what this husband of mine had to give. Furthermore, I was so impressed with the eagerness of young people to prepare themselves for marriage, that I shifted my own professional interests to this field. Ever since then we have been family folks in a double sense. We have shared a vigorously happy marriage and family life. And we have worked together side by side in family life education in our teaching, lecturing, and writing.

It is with pleasure and some understandable pride that I introduce to you my husband and co-worker, your author, whom I hope you will enjoy almost (if not quite) as much as I do.
Evelyn Millis Duvall, Ph.D. Executive Secretary, National Council on Family Relations Chicago, Illinois, 1949.

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