10.  Temperamental Incompatibility.—­It is difficult to catalogue and appraise the causal factors in desertion that lie in personality.  They are closely related to differences in background and are intimately involved with the sex relations of the pair.  We cannot, however, admit that they are identical with the latter, as some students of the subject claim; or that the only incompatibility in marriage is sex incompatibility.  Indeed, two people may be so incompatible as to find in sex their only common ground.

The commonest of these temperamental differences center about standards of right and wrong or proper and improper conduct.  Especially is this manifested in the bringing up of the children.  Extreme self-righteousness on the part of one or the other, nagging and petty criticism, unreasonable jealousy, “sulking spells,” violent quarrels, are some of its manifestations.  The idea of possession exercised by either of the couple, and especially a tendency to dominate or try to control on the part of the woman, may be a causal factor in desertion.  The lack of a saving sense of humor in one or both is often a complicating factor.  These comparatively minor differences take on a serious complexion in the minds of the couple; and it is surprising how often a deserting man will give promptly and with every appearance of feeling justified some cause for his desertion which falls clearly under this head.  “People forgive each other the big things; it’s the little things they can’t forgive.”

11.  Sex Incompatibility.—­There comes under this heading a wide range of causative factors which play an important part in marital discord.  Some of them are better understood by the social worker than was formerly the case; but many of them are obscure even to the practitioner of mental medicine, to whom their results come daily.  Distasteful as the task may be, the social worker should familiarize herself, through reading or through instruction by a qualified physician, in the commoner forms of these maladjustments.  This is not urged because it is part of the social worker’s task to make detailed inquiry into such matters or to pass judgment upon them, but because they often clamor for attention and need to be recognized by the first responsible person to whose notice they are brought.  Unless she knows, for instance, what constitutes excess in sex relations, a worker may misunderstand the situation described to her and condemn a man for being a selfish brute, when the trouble is really sexual anaesthesia in the wife.  It is well known that this single cause operates disastrously to disrupt many marriages or else to render them insupportable.  The warning should be added, however—­and it cannot be added too emphatically—­that the social worker must scrupulously refrain from making diagnoses in these cases, even tentatively; she must refer such data as come to her either to the general practitioner or to the psychiatrist, selecting one or the other as the symptoms presented may indicate.