But they had kept up their courtship by mail, and when they were together again in person during his recuperation Rogers found Helen’s support to be a balm. It was she who taught him to dance, and to whom he wrote and spoke about his conflicts with his parents. By the following fall they were engaged, and upon his graduation they were married and moved together to New York City where Rogers would start graduate school.
Rogers’ parents disapproved both of the marriage and of the graduate school. As to the marriage, they liked Helen but thought it absurd for their son to marry while he was still a student. As to the graduate school, in distinction, they were in favor of his going to seminary but were deeply disturbed by his particular choice. Rogers had chosen Union Theological Seminary because it was the most liberal in the country. For his fundamentalist parents, this meant that it was the devil in disguise. In a material expression of their conditions of worth, Rogers’ father offered to pay all expenses for both him and Helen if he would go to Princeton instead, which was at that time a center of fundamentalist thinking. Rogers rejected the offer indignantly, now fully embarked on a path of his own choosing.
Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest