IS PASSIONATE LOVE THE SUREST FOUNDATION FOR MARRIAGE?
“There is no subject,” says Bernard Shaw in the preface to Getting Married, “on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.” And though I disagree rather violently with Mr. Shaw’s views about marriage, he is right here. We do talk dangerous nonsense, which need not matter very much, if we did not think absurdly, and so inevitably have to pay the fruit in wrong action. This explains, I think, our curious levity, our unhappiness, and fierce refusal to face facts.
We have infested our ideals with the poison of pleasure and turned away from essential things. Marriage is not a religion to us—it is a sport.
I say this quite deliberately. I am sure we know better how to engage a servant, how to buy a house, how to set up in business—how, indeed, to do every unimportant thing in life, than we know how to choose a partner in marriage. We require a character with our cook or our butler, we engage an expert to test the drains of our house, we study and work to prepare ourselves for business, but in marriage we take no such sensible precautions; we even pride ourselves that we do not take them. We speak of falling in love, and we do fall.
The conventions of to-day are false; they are bound up with concealments or with an equally untruthful openness. It does not, however, follow from this that mere destruction will be enough, that everyone’s unguided ignorance will lead to success and freedom. The laisser faire system is as false in the realm of marriage as it is in industry and economics. While equally false, though this is rarely recognised, is the modern spiritual view of marriage that love can be found only in perfect harmony of character between the wife and the husband, and is independent of duty. It is true that love differs from lust in its deeper insight into the personality, deeper interest in character, as opposed to the inexpressive smooth outline and “untrained” physical beauty of the body. But the character and intellect may be studied and loved as self-centeredly, as much with a view to the enjoyment of mental excitement, as the body itself.
Of all of which what is the moral? This:
In marriage, as in other things, we fasten our chains about our own necks. We do not find what we desire because we do not know what we want.
The very word love is used in so general and indiscriminate a way to denote sometimes the most transitory impulse and sometimes the most intense feeling, that a mass of misunderstanding arises. The emotion which most often passes under the name of love is a maudlin, sickly sentiment or passion founded on hypocrisy, which means nothing at bottom but the desired enjoyment of a passion which is felt but not understood, and which professes to be everything but that which it is in reality.
With more courage to face truth, we should have a surer ideal; there would be much less sentimentality, but much deeper feeling about marriage. Our romance is slightly vulgar. Vulgarity is a sign of weakness of spirit, that spirit which is “the life that carves out life” as Nietzsche says.
We associate romance with courtship and not with marriage. “Thank God our love-time is ended!” cried a north country bride on the day that marriage ended her long engagement.
Now, I do not know whether this delightful story is true, but it does illustrate the attitude of many ordinary couples, whose love adventure ends at the very hour it should begin.
Every marriage ought to be a succession of courtships.
A very slight knowledge of existing marriages is sufficient to convince even the most optimistic believer that true mating is hard. I do not believe that most marriages are unhappy, but I do know that only the very few are happy. With many perhaps, and even with those who are passionate lovers, the attraction of sex always seems to fall short of its end; it draws the two together in a momentary self-forgetfulness, but for the rest it seems rather to widen their separateness. They are secret to one another in everything; united only in the sexual embrace.
Can we, then, ever find perfect love? Is it not like exercise of the body? You can develop it to a certain point, but not beyond, without danger; and very slowly, with continued patient effort. Do we not need exercise of the soul? I do not know. Often I feel I know nothing. To some men and women it is all simple enough, a woman is just a woman and a man is a man. The trouble begins when any woman becomes the one desired woman and any man the one desired man.
There is gain and development in this selective tendency of Love—and yet, if I am right, there is terrible danger lurking in the application of this egoistic spiritual view.
We may not safely ask too much or too little from marriage or take too high or too low a view of it.
I am not very hopeful of improvement. At least, not for a long time, and never unless we learn to be more honest about ourselves and about love.
In fear, we have tried to keep the blinds down so that love may be decently obscured. Yet how can we ever begin to understand and deal with these problems of sex unless we will admit all the instincts and tendencies which ever lead us backwards to the more elemental phases of life? The deepest of the emotions is sex, and its actions, like all the emotions that are fundamental, may be traced into a thousand bye-paths of the ordinary experience of each one of us; it exercises its influence on every period of our development, and works subconsciously to control our actions in endless ways that we refuse to acknowledge.
Hence the conflicts which manifest themselves so strangely and so fiercely in our lives. The emotional-self refuses, at times, to be controlled by the reason-self. Restraint cannot do much, and indeed, often brings deeper evils. For our unconscious selves are stronger than all the pretenses and guards we have set up by our conscious wills, either as individuals to encourage our own conceit and egoism, or collectively as a so-called civilized people in the hope of controlling conduct.
That is why so much that is said to-day about sexual conduct is so foolish. The real question is not what people ought to do, but what they actually do and want to do, and, therefore, are likely to go on doing. It is these facts that the reformers of marriage almost always fail to face.
To me, one thing, at least, is certain, the romantic view of marriage has failed us.
But we cannot change the ideal of to-day unless we have ready a new ideal to inspire our conduct. We cannot destroy a sanctuary unless we first build a sanctuary.
There is a strange idea among some young people to-day that sexual happiness can be gained by breaking away from all the traditional bonds, it is the visible sign of our confusion as a people, and the want of happiness in our lives. The new generation should not set at naught the experience of the ages.
The individual household where both parents share in the common interest of bringing up the children, is the foundation on which marriage has been built up, and on which it must stand. If the conditions of the home are seriously changed, and the bearing and caring for children is no longer considered an essential part of marriage, a change in marriage itself will follow. I do not think you can hold the one if you let the other go. For Westermark is right, and children should not be regarded as the result of marriage, but marriage as the result of children. And love between men and women implies duties and responsibilities that go out beyond themselves; without this, even love of the most passionate kind, loses its quality and tends to become an ephemeral or even a corrupt thing.
There is much stupidity in the view of many reformers of marriage who fail to see that, however hard it is to live faithfully to the obligation, and unchecked responsibilities of love, the old ideal of marriage does so appeal to our emotional nature, that men and women are seriously unhappy in trying to destroy it.
Not all who cry “It is useless,” can do without the limiting safeguards of children and of legal marriage. We still feel the serpent’s sting of jealousy and the old questions, “Where do you come from?” “What have you been doing to-night?” “Who handled your body till daytime, while I watched and wept?” “In what bed did you lie and whom did you gladden with your smile?” are still felt, even if not uttered by the lips, of the most emancipated husbands and wives. For our sex-judgments are not intellectual, nor are they merely moral; they are not just questions of understanding and forgiving, but they are also physical, of the nerves, of the blood, of the fiercest instinct.
Fortunately it is easier to talk of love’s freedom, than it is to act as if it ever could be free. And in spite of what advanced people say, some feeling of duty in sex will always exist as long as it hurts us at all to hurt others. The immorality that says, “Do what you desire irrespective of others,” is as yet beyond most of us.
Attempts to solve these problems quickly are bound to fail. Intellectual revolutionists are, I think too hopeful with regard to what may be done to produce a harmony of sexual needs. The optimism that once prevailed in regard to economics is being transformed to sexual matters. Once people supposed that if every one followed his own interests a harmony would automatically establish itself in the economy of society. Now they tend to say the same about sex.
Intellectual views of life and what is right and wrong always act to break people into groups, each struggling to explain everything according to one theory, built on a single principle. And as the result of caring so much for one thing, people seem quite unable to grasp any facts that do not refer to their own particular reform; they are not able even to consider it as part of a world in which there is anything else. All the evil in marriage? is due to too large families and populations pressing upon the food supply, we are told by one class of enthusiasts, while others point to men’s tyranny over women. Emancipation for women, with an equal moral standard, would have a magical effect: men are all bad say some. The father is a parasite, unnecessary except for his share in begetting the child; the mother is the one parent. All would be well if legal marriage were abolished and motherhood made free, is the view common among one class of reformers. Eugenical breeding and sterilisation of the unfit is the remedy brought forward by others. Many suggest economic changes and the endowment of motherhood.
But the matter is not so simple as these reformers seem to believe. And I doubt if any outward change is really capable of producing the prompt kind of penny-in-the-slot results that its supporters claim that it can. The complexity of marriage (in particular, the occurrence of sexual disharmonies so present and active for misery to-day) is ignored by all intellectual reformers. It is because they have no emotional hold on life as a whole that they find it easy to squeeze all life into their magic theories. For myself I can see no sure remedy—though in a later essay I shall try to suggest a palliative: but were I asked to state my deepest belief, I could say only “A few thousand years more of development, a growth towards consciousness and a fuller understanding of the meaning of life.”