Is your basic attitude toward life appreciative or demanding? Your attitude determines your altitude of your relationship.

Are you always annoyed at what you lack, or grateful for what you have? Which do you see first, the doughnut or the hole? Many others, while less successful in their beginnings, have the same demanding attitude toward life.

As dating partners, they should be avoided. But how is one to know? The attention of such a demanding person is centered upon what they do not have, or conditions which ought to be different.

If they go on a picnic they will constantly be harping on the fact that Susan forgot to put the ice cubes in the lemonade, or Bill and Sally were late, or Jimmie forgot to bring his sweater.

Therefore the whole occasion has been ruined for them, and they will make sure that it is also ruined for everyone else. Such attitudes of constant complaint should be signs for those who are matrimonial prospects to take cover.

A second symptom is that they can't be pleased. They seem to reject everybody. The singer flats her high notes. The strings in the orchestra were not good.

Nothing that anybody can do is good enough. Another form of this difficulty is the belief that their problems could be solved if they only had enough of everything.

If only I had enough money, sex, clothes, a nice enough house, a good enough car, a social standing which was high enough, then I would find life good.

Such people are partly right in their diagnosis. They are unhappy because they are deprived. Their real tragedy is that they do not know what they lack.

Hence their pitiable efforts to get more and ever more of what they have, and their failure to find real satisfactions after they have been successful.

No wonder he is desperate. So it is with the hungers of personality. People whose real needs are to love others and to be at peace within themselves, mistakenly suppose that more money, power or prestige will satisfy their hungers.

They are often worse off when they succeed than when they fail, because in failure they can always hope that success would make them happy.

We rightly feel sorry for such people. But their difficulties lie mainly within themselves. Until these have been corrected, they cannot make a success of any relationships.

However hungry they may be for companionship and love, to marry such a one before they are cured would be only to add to the already increasing unhappy marriage statistics.

For a good marriage risk, find the person who would be grateful for the honest love of a worthy man; grateful for the home she could enjoy. Find the man who would be grateful for a family; the man who can enjoy simple pleasures, magazines, books, occasional outings, ball games, and especially the companionship of friends.

Find the people who enjoy children, who like to hear their neighbors sing in the church choir, or play in band concerts, if there is plenty of popcorn.

Life is good for those who are able to select and appropriate the parts in it which are good. An appreciative attitude toward life should not, and need not lead to unwholesome docility. To select the good is not to close our eyes to the evil, or to fail to combat it.

We should be able to distinguish between good and bad in music, government, bananas and carpentry work. The optimist can be more dangerous than the pessimist. The good prospective mate is not insensitive to evils.

They approach all of life, both evil and good, with a creative attitude. They differs from the whiner not in what they see but in what they selects to live with! Now that's the right attitude toward life!