The Loving Americans

"I have often been struck by the self-containedness of the family lives of most of the Americans I have met. Their lives seem to center on the immediate family much more than ours do, while their links with remoter relations and friends seem to be much looser."

This judgment, in Britain's Manchester Guardian, is by a top journalist with the improbable name of Taya Zinkin, who is married to an executive of Unilever Ltd. and has spent considerable time in the U.S. studying at the University of Wisconsin and visiting her White Russian parents in New Jersey and her brother in New Mexico. Most Americans, she says, ascribe this marital warmth to the geographical and class mobility of U.S. life, which makes a family more dependent on its own resources. But to these factors Mrs. Zinkin adds a more original explanation: "the dating system."

"Going steady so early must, I feel, be responsible to a large extent for the way American couples depend upon each other. Intimacy which survives adolescence must be spared much of the tension which arises when adults, strangers yesterday, enter into the difficult relationship of marriage."

But all too often the price of this smooth transition is isolation from the world outside the picture window. "The steady one marries is so much one's half that one hardly needs anybody else. Every problem, every ambition has been shared for so long that one is terribly dependent on one's mate. The extent to which successful American marriages succeed never fails to hit me when I watch grandparents behaving like honeymooners, always together, holding hands and cooing. There are, of course, those who divorce, but I suspect that the high rate of divorce in America comes from the tremendous expectation placed on marriage, by a certain lack of maturity at the time of choice, and by the isolation of the couple."

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