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Comment by Scubabear68 | Hacker News Reader

There obvious historical issues with this book that make it hard to apply to today, but I was still surprised at how well written this was for it’s time.

This also shows the importance of birth control in women’s lives. In 1946, sex was a roll of the dice to being pregnant. The odds are now massively improved to avoid pregnancy by using modern birth control methods.

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> but I was still surprised at how well written this was for it’s time.

I've read several books written by soldiers who fought in WW1 and the Boer War.

It's fascinating to read a book written 100+ years ago that is easy to read, informative and witty all at the same time.

Sure, there are some things that are hard to understand b/c they don't exist anymore (E.g. "the crates were packed with excelsior") but overall they've been very interesting.

Marriage would be so much more straightforward if many of the lessons that we had to learn anyway were presented up front. It’s too bad that so many pre-marriage “courses” are religious in nature.

Totally this. I wish schools taught relationship dynamics, family issues, basic finance, etc. rather than useless maths and archaic grammar. I never learned that stuff from my parents and spent decades learning it the hard way.

> how well written this was for it’s time

This is the first time I've encountered the sentiment that things have become better written in the last 3-6 generations. Are you really surprised that a book from 1946 would be well written? I´d love to glean an idea of your views on this to widen my own views.

I only meant that specifically in regards to this topic, “finding a mate”. The era was fairly repressive on the topic and so many euphemisms and religious over tones to everything. This was refreshingly straight forward.

You figure people were just bad writers back then? If anything, I'd say they were better writers, though probably only marginally. Read a couple scientific papers from 1945 and you'll more than likely actually enjoy yourself, for example. There's a kind of frankness to a lot of mid-century writing that a lot of cutesy modern writing lacks.

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