MARRIAGE REFORM
Many people seem to be in fear that any change in the marriage laws will destroy marriage. “Hands off! No tinkering with marriage!” they cry in a panic of timidity and moral anger.
I marvel at this want of faith. Do they, indeed, believe that the institution of marriage rests on a trembling quicksand, so that its supporters are compelled to build a scaffolding of lies to sustain its foundations?
The laws of marriage are only the register of what marriage is: they do not control marriage. There are no laws, for instance, to regulate the perfect love-unions of birds, whose faithfulness and family life present a beautiful and high standard of conduct.
Let there be no mistake here. I have been told that I wish to destroy permanent marriage, that I do not consider the welfare of children and the best interests of the race. I deny these charges; they are untrue.
My ideal of marriage is one that many will call old-fashioned. It demands the consecration of the mother in service to her husband, to their children, and the home. That is why I advocate the recognition and regulation of other forms of union, not because I have a low ideal, but to prevent the degradation of marriage by forcing into it those who do not desire, and, therefore, are unsuited for, its binding duties.
The immense failure of marriage to-day arises from the confusion of our desires and our ceaseless search for individual happiness. We have no firm ideal, no fixed standard of conduct either for women or for men. And the existence of many standards of what ought to be done; the liberty permitted to the man, the liberty permitted to the woman; if the wife shall continue her work or profession or remain at home dependent on the husband’s earnings; whether the marriage shall be fruitful or sterile—these are but a few of the questions left undecided. And thus to leave men and women unguided, with their own ideas of what is good to do and what is evil, is the dry-rot very surely destroying the ideal of marriage.
Every couple starts anew and alone, and the way is too difficult for solitary experiments.
This modern delusion of looking at marriage as an individual affair is of course, the essence of the selfish, egocentric habit of life—it focuses desire on personal adventure and personal needs. With more courage to face the realities of love we should have a surer ideal. There would be less sentimentality, but much deeper feeling about marriage.
This, then, is what I would teach: No longer must marriage be regarded solely as a personal relationship. Marriage is a religious duty.
“To be mothers were women created, and to be fathers, men.”
This was the ideal which gave the breath of life to marriage among the men and women in our earlier England, who were more fixed in character and less selfish than we are to-day.
It is this ideal we have lost.
TO-DAY’S IDEAS ON MARRIAGE
ARE WE SEEKING VAINLY AFTER HAPPINESS?
The love-story of to-day differs in one essential way from the love-story of yesterday. Yesterday’s love-story always had a youthful hero and heroine, and ended with the marriage bells. To-day’s, which is a far harder love-story to write, begins with marriage. Moreover, the bride and bridegroom are rarely young, nor are they ravishingly beautiful.
Earlier authors in short, shirked the real problem of marriage. They ended where they should have begun. For the main difficulties, in that always difficult adventure of the two learning to live as one, do not lie in youth, the period of quick adaptation, of easy falling in love. The trouble does not often begin in the courtship or honeymoon days; but it comes later in the struggle to harmonise and bend the character to the demands and lessons of marriage, and in the continued effort of maintaining love after knowledge of love has come. There is the difficulty. The preservation of love when all the passionate preliminaries are over.
Love is not walking round a rose garden in the sunshine; it is living together, working together. And the honeymoon is as trifling as the hors d’oeuvre in comparison with wedded life, and as unable to satisfy the deep needs of women and men. And the greatest difficulty rests in the fact that very few of us understand what our deeper needs are. Even to ourselves we are strangers. That is one reason why marriage is always difficult.
You see so often the partner one falls in love with does not make a good life companion. It’s all very well to moralise, but you can hardly ever be certain beforehand how these relations will turn out. There is physical attraction and passion, and there is affection—just being pals with each other. Who is to know which is the more necessary—the better for happiness of these two? You ought to have both, but few couples are so fortunate as that. We are almost all of us divided in our desires and our wills as also in our love.
The boys or girls to-day are, I think, more natural. There is much greater openness and less pretence. Even our novelists frankly say that every woman looks with special interest on a well formed man. There is no convention marking this as improper, “the baser side of love.” We Victorians were everlasting children in an everlasting nursery; we did not play with love, but we fiercely refused seriousness towards the fundamental emotions. Perhaps that is why we lost the old firm tradition of marriage and its duties, and why we have succeeded in putting nothing in its place.
The disease of our wills and the sickness of our souls has rust-eaten into marriage. We are doing nothing because we are too frightened to be serious. We have sought to drown our unhappiness and the exhaustion of our souls, to fill emptiness with pleasure; to place the personal good in marriage above the racial duty; to forget responsibility, and, in so doing, inevitably we have turned aside from essential things.
We have missed happiness in trying to grab at it.
Cannot you see what is wrong? We are so terribly tired of this search for something that we never find. We are like little lost children, we run, this way and that, we cry and make much noise, in fear, seeking for our mothers. Yes, our adventures are the tricks of the child who fantasies so as to pretend that everything is right when in reality everything is wrong.
Love is a dream to those who think but a terrible reality to those who feel.
The frequent and tragic failure of so many marriages arises from a confusion of our values and our undisciplined wills. In one way we expect too much from love, while in another we expect too little. What we have lost is any fixed standard of duty. I have said this before: I must say it again.
Marriage has ceased to be a discipline, it has become an adventure.
It is, little as we may believe it, the search for deeper and more perfect love that so often endangers love. Seeking, always for the one satisfying mate, we must find a partner corresponding in every respect to our ideal. The man in Mr. Hardy’s novel, “The Well-Beloved,” spent forty years in trying to do this, and his ultimate failure is typical of the experience of most of us.
Fools and blind, we neither understand nor seek the cause of our failure.
We need a new consciousness of our social spirit and racial responsibilities in marriage: the idea of handing down, at least as much as we have received. We are the guardians of the Life Force. Let us honour ideals of self-dedication; of fixed obligations of the one sex to the other, of duties to our children long before they are born, and let us spread the New Romance of Love’s Responsibility to Life; then there will be in society in general and not in a mere fraction of it, happiness in marriage and passionate parenthood.