Love not only laughs at prison bars, love scoffs at parental differences as well as at parental control.
Yet is it true that wide divergence in family background is accountable for many of the tragedies of broken families after love has cooled and the facts of sober obligations incurred have become obvious.
The great social need in the United States is for means of acquaintance and friendship for the young in lines of association in which a safe and helpful marriage choice may be made.

William Penn said, "Never marry but for love, but see that thou lovest what is lovely." The effort of all social arrangements for the young in families where the elders do not try to reinstate parental control but rather to give a chance for safeguarded independence of choice is to bring together young people who should find, each one of them in that group, a chosen one of the right sort.

Financial capacity, mutually congenial relatives, suitable age and similar tastes, after acquaintance giving reasonable basis for hope for permanent agreement in essentials, might insure suitable marriages.

The many advantages of close friendships within a group bound together by similar culture and outlook is the real reason for "society." Often foolish in its ways and defeating its own higher ends, it is yet a real effort to give a new and more democratic guidance through favorable circumstances, rather than through personal will or family rule, to the marriage choice of youth.
The reason why one is chosen and another not is never clear to any but the ones who make the choice.

To them, indeed, it may be a mystery, but one they are sure must have its source in the necessity of things.
To others it is often a puzzle past understanding because so many of the friends of each of the twain "would have chosen so differently, you know." Something of racial need both for mixture and for persistency of type, something of hidden demand of temperament for a complementary personality, something of easy awakening of passion and easy holding of attention, something of requirement for a larger sympathy than most friends can give and the favored one seems able to supply--all these enter into the selection of the chosen one from all the rest of one's friends.