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legislation; homosexual relations between consenting adults are no longer considered a crime.

And in the United States a meeting of Episcopal clergymen concluded publicly that

homosexuality might, under certain circumstances, be adjudged "good." The day may also

come when a court decides that a couple of stable, well educated homosexuals might make

decent "parents."

We might also see the gradual relaxation of bars against polygamy. Polygamous

families exist even now, more widely than generally believed, in the midst of "normal"

society. Writer Ben Merson, after visiting several such families in Utah where polygamy is

still regarded as essential by certain Mormon fundamentalists, estimated that there are some

30,000 people living in underground family units of this type in the United States. As sexual

attitudes loosen up, as property rights become less important because of rising affluence, the

social repression of polygamy may come to be regarded as irrational. This shift may be

facilitated by the very mobility that compels men to spend considerable time away from their

present homes. The old male fantasy of the Captain's Paradise may become a reality for

some, although it is likely that, under such circumstances, the wives left behind will demand

extramarital sexual rights. Yesterday's "captain" would hardly consider this possibility.

Tomorrow's may feel quite differently about it.

Still another family form is even now springing up in our midst, a novel childrearing

unit that I call the "aggregate family"—a family based on relationships between divorced and

remarried couples, in which all the children become part of "one big family." Though

sociologists have paid little attention as yet to this phenomenon, it is already so prevalent that

it formed the basis for a hilarious scene in a recent American movie entitled Divorce

American Style. We may expect aggregate families to take on increasing importance in the

decades ahead.

Childless marriage, professional parenthood, postretirement childrearing, corporate

families, communes, geriatric group marriages, homosexual family units, polygamy—these,

then, are a few of the family forms and practices with which innovative minorities will

experiment in the decades ahead. Not all of us, however, will be willing to participate in such

experimentation. What of the majority?

THE ODDS AGAINST LOVE

Minorities experiment; majorities cling to the forms of the past. It is safe to say that large

numbers of people will refuse to jettison the conventional idea of marriage or the familiar

family forms. They will, no doubt, continue searching for happiness within the orthodox

format. Yet, even they will be forced to innovate in the end, for the odds against success may

prove overwhelming.

The orthodox format presupposes that two young people will "find" one another and

marry. It presupposes that the two will fulfill certain psychological needs in one another, and

that the two personalities will develop over the years, more or less in tandem, so that they

continue to fulfill each other's needs. It further presupposes that this process will last "until

death do us part."

These expectations are built deeply into our culture. It is no longer respectable, as it

once was, to marry for anything but love. Love has changed from a peripheral concern of the

family into its primary justification. Indeed, the pursuit of love through family life has

become, for many, the very purpose of life itself.

Love, however, is defined in terms of this notion of shared growth. It is seen as a

beautiful mesh of complementary needs, flowing into and out of one another, fulfilling the

loved ones, and producing feelings of warmth, tenderness and devotion. Unhappy husbands

often complain that they have "left their wives behind" in terms of social, educational or

intellectual growth. Partners in successful marriages are said to "grow together."

This "parallel development" theory of love carries endorsement from marriage

counsellors, psychologists and sociologists. Thus, says sociologist Nelson Foote, a specialist

on the family, the quality of the relationship between husband and wife is dependent upon

"the degree of matching in their phases of distinct but comparable development."

If love is a product of shared growth, however, and we are to measure success in

marriage by the degree to which matched development actually occurs, it becomes possible to

make a strong and ominous prediction about the future.

It is possible to demonstrate that, even in a relatively stagnant society, the mathematical

odds are heavily stacked against any couple achieving this ideal of parallel growth. The odds

for success positively plummet, however, when the rate of change in society accelerates, as it

now is doing. In a fast-moving society, in which many things change, not once, but

repeatedly, in which the husband moves up and down a variety of economic and social scales,

in which the family is again and again torn loose from home and community, in which

individuals move further from their parents, further from the religion of origin, and further

from traditional values, it is almost miraculous if two people develop at anything like

comparable rates.

If, at the same time, average life expectancy rises from, say, fifty to seventy years,

thereby lengthening the term during which this acrobatic feat of matched development is

supposed to be maintained, the odds against success become absolutely astronomical. Thus,

Nelson Foote writes with wry understatement: "To expect a marriage to last indefinitely

under modern conditions is to expect a lot." To ask love to last indefinitely is to expect even

more. Transience and novelty are both in league against it.

TEMPORARY MARRIAGE

It is this change in the statistical odds against love that accounts for the high divorce and

separation rates in most of the techno-societies. The faster the rate of change and the longer

the life span, the worse these odds grow. Something has to crack.

In point of fact, of course, something has already cracked—and it is the old insistence

on permanence. Millions of men and women now adopt what appears to them to be a sensible

and conservative strategy. Rather than opting for some offbeat variety of the family, they

marry conventionally, they attempt to make it "work," and then, when the paths of the

partners diverge beyond an acceptable point, they divorce or depart. Most of them go on to

search for a new partner whose developmental stage, at that moment, matches their own.

As human relationships grow more transient and modular, the pursuit of love becomes,

if anything, more frenzied. But the temporal expectations change. As conventional marriage

proves itself less and less capable of delivering on its promise of lifelong love, therefore, we

can anticipate open public acceptance of temporary marriages. Instead of wedding "until

death us do part," couples will enter into matrimony knowing from the first that the

relationship is likely to be short-lived.

They will know, too, that when the paths of husband and wife diverge, when there is

too great a discrepancy in developmental stages, they may call it quits—without shock or

embarrassment, perhaps even without some of the pain that goes with divorce today. And

when the opportunity presents itself, they will marry again ... and again ... and again.

Serial marriage—a pattern of successive temporary marriages—is cut to order for the

Age of Transience in which all man's relationships, all his ties with the environment, shrink

in duration. It is the natural, the inevitable outgrowth of a social order in which automobiles