SINGLE AND RADCLIFFE

To the Editor of the Herald:

I am writing concerning the showing of a film short on "Love and Kinsey," which makes marital fidelity seem old-fashioned, bourgeois, and dull.

I write to you not as a middle-aged housewife, suspicious of her own husband's nocturnal wanderings or anticipatory of "The Seven-Year Itch," but as a nineteen-year-old college student, single and realistic. I have always considered myself nowise naive of the ways of the world, yet cannot help feeling distressed at this off-hand nourishment given to seeds of infidelity which might otherwise remain dormant. It is all too easy to slip into a pattern of behaviour which, though inherently wrong, has been condoned by "THE modern thinkers." Whether or not the statistics are true, I do not believe that they should be gleefully flouted about as if to say, "Guess what's happening in one out of five marriages! Wise up!"

The contemptuous treatment of the happily married couple, those who have "other interests" to fill their waking hours, admits no such thing as love, the highest ideal of mankind, the only real stability in a world so transient and insecure as is ours, only screaming responsibility. These couples are just too stupid to be other than doggedly faithful. This is certainly most depressing to a young woman seriously contemplating marriage.

I do not think our society is stable or mature enough not to be taken in by the quasi-sophistication of the film. Condoning marital infidelity in a humorous vein may go by the boards as fun but please consider the subsequent anguish, mistrust, and havoc it may provoke in the hearts of many married men and women. A RADCLIFFIAN--CLASS OF 1958

(The letter came to us anonymously, but it seemed sufficiently interesting to warrant suspending our rule.--Editor.)   --The Boston Herald January 12, 1956