PASSIONATE FRIENDSHIPS

I had wished to write these essays without too frequent mention of the war. I find, however, that such avoidance is almost impossible. For the war has, in the most effective way, made prominent all the problems of sexual conduct with which I am dealing, has done this so effectively that some way out must be found. New and even startling changes have come and are coming, and have to be faced. Certainly our judgments can never be the same. Many who never before thought about these things have been made to think. All of us have seen more plainly the ineffectiveness of much that always before we had accepted. No longer can we cover our eyes with the comfortable mid-Victorian bandages. There has ended for every one of us our blind-man’s-buff game with life.

We are caught: and it is well. The unwritten commandment of sexual conduct, that anything may be done as long as the doing of it may be hidden, can never, I think, again be accepted, unless, indeed, by the very good, whose entire lack of humour makes them able to accept anything.

Whether we like it or not most of us have got now to muck-rake into the dark bye-paths of conduct.

Now, it is easy to say that this urgent concern with sexual questions arises from decadence. I do not believe it. To me it has always seemed that this growing demand for inquiry affords the surest hope for the future. Much is being thrown on to the scrap-heap of life. This is done only when there is need for it. We, who have come to see and in some measure to understand, have got to be concerned with sex and its problems, until some of its wrongs are righted.

Here I must digress to make a necessary explanation. The special problem of sexual conduct which now I wish to consider—the very difficult problem of passionate friendships between men and women who, for one reason or another, are unable or do not wish to marry, is a question to which my interest has for very long been directed. I was first asked to write about it in 1913 (how remote that time now seems) in answer to two articles that had appeared in the English Review, in July and August of that year, Women and Morals and Men and Morals, supposed to have been written, the one by “A Mother,” and the other by “A Father;” but which, as later transpired, were thought out and transcribed in the office, by the Editor and sub-Editor of that then courageous journal.

But to whatever journalistic trickery they owed their origin, the interest of those articles remained unchanged. I need not wait to describe them; their importance rested in the courage and truth with which they faced the difficult problem, at that time almost always hidden or sentimentalised over, of the sex-needs of men and women apart from marriage.

I was asked to answer—I had, as it were, to sum up, sift out, weigh and judge, what was said in both articles. I did not then know anything of their bastard authorship, and I accepted. My answer appeared in the September number of the Review. At the time it gained some attention. In America the three articles were republished together. The little book, called “Women and Morals” had an exceedingly attractive cover and an excellent preface: I believe it sold widely. More amusing and also, I think, more witness to the power of my work, was a very different kind of notoriety which, in one quarter at least, it achieved in this country. It aroused anger. The number of the English Review in which it appeared was, I believe, burnt publicly in an Advanced Club for women by order of the ladies who then formed the committee. For their intense virtue considered my views too horrible to remain uncleansed by fire. (Excuse my laughing, but the fact is I always do laugh when I picture this incident—those splendidly blinkered women holding solemnly in extended fire-tongs that burning review!)

My work was immoral!

Immoral! What is it that people mean? I do not know. I am for morality and always shall be. That is, indeed, why I offend. I am always wanting to turn out dirty places and to spring-clean life. And I have to show things as I find them, not as I would like them to be. It is so easy if you drug your soul and place blinkers over your intelligence. But you cannot be moral if you are over-occupied with being nice.

It is the young, not the old, who are thinking and writing to-day. Let me give you an example that exactly fits this question we are considering.

By a somewhat suggestive coincidence there appeared an article on “Youth and Marriage” in the English Review for May, 1923—the last number issued under the editorship of Mr. Austin Harrison—which very strikingly repeats, but more openly and with cruder emphasis, almost everything that was said in the three articles published in 1913. It treats the same difficult and still unsettled question of sexual relationships outside of marriage. The article gives the answer of youth to the old, who are criticising and condemning the friendships and new freedom of sex intimacy between young women and young men: they are told frankly that they fail to realise the changed conditions of present-day life. The name of the writer of this interesting article, Vera M. Garrell, is unknown to me, but I take this opportunity of thanking her. Her article has given me the greatest pleasure. All the facts are considered in a refreshingly candid, if not always entirely adequate way. (1) The increased enormous disparity between the numbers of the sexes, which the writer comments upon as “an outstanding tragedy of the war;” leading as it must do, to “an unhealthy competition to attract men,” under the urge of which girls are drawn “to use coarser measures and act on bolder lines,” if they are to escape “the dark dread that haunts the average girl of being ‘left on the shelf.’” (2) The economic factors, which cause marriage to become increasingly difficult, and thus act in lowering the marriage ideal by making a permanent union so remote that it comes to be regarded as “practically impossible.” “The young people of to-day are very much realists. They intensely dislike poverty.” A great deal is said about this “economic blockade against marriage,” and the writer maintains that “much of the laxity in sexual morals is the direct outcome of this position.” (3) Yet, even deeper in their action are the inner reasons. War has left the youth of to-day “with a kind of sexual neurosis.” For years it kept life “entirely physical;” “morality was at a discount,” the inescapable result has been that “youth has been lured into sexual compromise.” The old code of morality has failed: it does not meet the new demands.

I have been impressed and sharply hurt at the bitterness and fatalism underneath what is written. Let me quote one or two sentences. “The charge against youth is correct. He is in revolt against conventional morality. Young men and young women are sex conscious, not on the old lines of retiring from intimacy, but rather in the opposite direction of intimacy.” And again, “Every sex companionship is born of mutual recognition of social grievances. Where it is possible for men and women to come together and form friendships they do so, without any regard for the commital convention that marriage must be the object.” (The italics in the passages are mine.)

It is insisted upon that every normal person has a right to self-expression in the sex-function, while further frank acknowledgement is made that when sex-friendship “is unregulated it ends in vice.” “We shall not marry so why not enjoy ourselves,” is the prevailing philosophy of those who have ceased to regard the sexual act as immoral. (Again the italics are mine).

Now, all this has set me thinking that it is worth while to restate certain propositions in connection with these friendships of passion, which I made first in the article I wrote in 1913. I do this for two reasons. First I would like to assure the young, who to-day are more than ever impatient of, and condemnatory of, the old, that the old are not always ignorant and that some of them, too, have tried honestly to face this difficult problem of sexual conduct. The second reason is deeper. A sickness of soul cries out from so much that the young say to-day. I want to end this. And the only way in which I know to do this in connection with these unregulated friendships is to have them regulated.

It is ridiculous to say as so many of the young do to-day that sexual relationships between two people affect no one but themselves, unless a child is born. It is not true. The partners in even the strongest and purest union have no right to say to society, “This is our business and none of yours.” The consequences may be so grave and wide-reaching for society that the sex-deed can never be confined to the pair concerned.

And I would go further even than this. For the sexual partnership that is kept secret, almost of necessity, will work anti-socially. Just in the same way as in any other secret partnership, opportunity will be given to those who desire to escape from the responsibilities of the partnership. This inevitably leads to the commital of sin, by those who are weak and unfixed in character. While other men and women of higher conscience, who wish to, and would act honourably, often find the way so difficult that they fail in their endeavours—lose themselves in the dark and tangled ways of concealment. Many unions that now are shameful, would not have been shameful, if the partners had not been drawn into deceitful concealments, that cannot fail to act in a way disastrous to love.

This problem of Passionate Friendships, like all problems of sexual conduct, demands something more than emotional treatment; it requires the most careful consideration of many different sets of facts, that often rise up in what seem to be direct opposition.

I must follow this a little further. The sex-needs are almost always dealt with as though they stood apart and lay out of line with any other need or faculty of our bodies. This is, in part, due to secrecy which has kept sex as something mysterious. We have most of us been trained from our childhood into indecent secretiveness. There is as well deeper trouble, and it will be a long time before we can change it. Sex is so powerful in most of us, and occupies really so large a part of our attention, that we are afraid of ourselves, and this re-acts in fear of any open acknowledgement of our sex-needs.

It is necessary before we can even begin to judge this question of passionate friendships, to face very frankly this tremendous force of the sex-impulses, for the most part veiled in discussion. Next to hunger this is the most imperative of our needs, and, indeed, to-day sex enters more into conscious thought than hunger. For the hunger needs of most of us are satisfied, while the sex-needs are thwarted and restrained in all kinds of ways, and thus insist themselves the more insistently in our thoughts. Here is some slight explanation why so many of our judgments about sex are so arbitrary and so unforgiving. In penalising the sexual misconduct of others we are really passing judgment, though we do not know it, on our ourselves in blaming them we gain a curious kind of vicarious salvation, which brings the peace of self-forgiveness. In devising punishments for others, we are fixing a compensatory sacrifice for our deeply buried wishes, which never having found relief, either in direct expression or by sublimation, remain to torment us with ceaseless conflicts in our unconscious life.

I must not follow this further. Anyone with knowledge of the new psychology will understand what I mean.

Now, what I want to emphasise is that, to some limited extent at any rate, this system of self-concealments and lies is being broken, or if that view is too hopeful, at least the point of view has shifted. Indeed it is the acceptance of the imperative force of sex hunger, and the frank recognition of the present position—a fearless acknowledgment of the natural right of every adult woman as well as man to sex experience, that renders so noteworthy the change in outlook between this generation and the last. The youth of to-day have been fearless enough to cry aloud desires that the men and women of my generation, either denied or whispered about. Within its limits (and I am bound to say that, in my opinion, these limits are badly fixed and very narrow), this is the most truthful generation that yet has existed. I am glad to have lived to know it.

It is true that the many difficult problems of sexual conduct, of which we hear so much and so continuously, in almost every case are approached from one side only—the personal-pleasure side. That is why there is so much waste and foolishness. It explains too, why there is no consistent and united movement; no attempt at trying to find for everyone some possible decent way out—an escape from the terrible conditions which we are all agreed exist under the difficulties and strain of our under-controlled and over-civilised life.

A new conception of morality is, indeed, called for, but we have to be clearer as to what it is to be and where it is taking us. You will see at once what I mean. Until new safeguards are established, the old restriction cannot safely be loosened. It is too dangerous. The brief passionate partnership must entail disaster, in particular for the woman. She must still pay the heavier price of love. For what do these partnerships really mean? There can be no glossing with talk about freedom here. It is the old solution, the giving by the woman without security, what is given by the woman who is married under security and permanence.

I do not believe this can be accepted as an established and permitted thing as soon as we come to consider the lasting results.

It is an essential part of sexual morality, as I conceive it, that in any relation between the two sexes—I care not whether the association be legal or illegal, recognised or unrecognised—the position of the woman, as the potential mother must be made secure. This is a social, not a private matter. As such it has always been accepted by a wise State: it is the disgrace of our lax civilisation that too often to-day it is forgotten or ignored.

We come then to this—How can provision be made for honourable partnerships with security for the woman outside of marriage? For I am altogether persuaded that this provision must be made in order to harmonise our sexual life, and meet the desires of a large and increasing number of young people, whose exceptional needs our existing institutions and customs ignore or crush.

We must all of us know from our experience of life that many women as well as men are by their temperaments unsuited for monagonious marriage—the living permanently with one partner for life. Often, I would even say as a rule, these individuals are strongly sexual. They will not, because with the character they have, they cannot, live for any long period celibate. They will marry to gain permanent sexual relief or, if they are men, they will buy temporary relief from prostitutes, unless they are able to seek satisfaction in an irregular union.

Now, I affirm it as my conviction that the first and second of these courses are likely to lead to greater misery and sin than the third course; and of the three, the first, in my opinion, is the worst. I have, no doubt at all on this matter. No one, who is not blind to the facts of life, can close their eyes to the evil and suffering that certainly follows, when permanent marriage is entered into by those people who are unfitted and do not desire to fulfil the obligations and duties of living faithfully with one partner. And I would ask all those who stand in fear of change or reform, and cannot contemplate any open toleration of wider opportunities for sexual friendships to consider this fact: the discredit which has fallen upon marriage arises largely from the demoralising lives lived under its cover by those unsuited for enduring mating.

It is commonly taken for granted that love and passion in men is quite different from love and passion in women. I am sure this is not true. It is very necessary to break down the idea that for the impulses of sex, with their immense complications and differences, there is one general rule. Nor is it possible, I am sure, to make any for arbitrary judgments. To me the man or woman who is able to live in faithful love with one partner is not necessarily better than the man or woman who is not so able. I may prefer the one type, and dislike the other, but that again is a matter of personal judgment. We cannot safely class those who differ from ourselves as wrong, and set them down as fit only for suppression and education. We have to put aside the old shrieks of blame that are possible only to the ignorant.

It is all very well to preach the ideal of complete sexual abstinence until marriage, but there are the clear, hard conditions of contemporary circumstances for all but the really rich, who can marry when they want to do so without other considerations, and the very poor who marry young because they have nothing at all to consider. We have to face the presence among us to-day of an amount of suffering through enforced celibacy, which is acting in many directions in degrading our sexual lives. Any number of these sufferers, both the unmarried and the married who are ill-mated, are everywhere amongst us. I need not wait to prove this: the facts face us all, unless, indeed, we are too wilfully blind and too prejudiced to see what is happening.

I would propose as a first step towards honesty and health, that we ought to claim an open declaration of the existence of any form of sexual relationship between a woman and a man. We shall, I believe, have to do it, if not now, then later, because we are finding out the evils that must ensue, both to the individuals concerned and to the society of which they are members, by forcing men and women into the dark, immoral way of concealments.

I believe if there were some open recognition of these partnerships outside of marriage, not necessarily permanent, with proper provision for the woman and her children, should there be any, a provision not dependent on the generosity of the man and made after the love which sanctioned the union had waned, but decided upon by the man and woman in the form of a contract before the relationships were entered upon, there would be many women ready to undertake such unions gladly; there would even be some women as well as men, who, I believe, would prefer them to permanent marriage, which binds them to one partner for life and as a rule entails mutual living together and the giving up by the woman of her work or profession. In this way many marriages would be prevented which inevitably come to disaster. It is also possible that such friendship-contracts might, under present disastrous conditions, be made by those who are unsuitably mated and yet are unable or do not wish to entirely sever the bond between them, with some other partner they could love. Such contracts would open up possibilities of honourable partnership to many who must suffer from enforced sexual abstinence or be driven into hateful concealed intimacies.

I do not think we need fear to do this. My own faith in monogamous marriage, the living together of one man and one woman for the life of both, as the most practical, the best, and the happiest form of union for the great majority of people, is so strongly rooted that I do not wish, because I hold it unnecessary, to force anyone either to enter or stay within its bonds. I want them to do this because they themselves want to be bound. We get further and further away from real monogamy by allowing no other form of honourable partnerships.

Under present conditions and the prejudice of social opinion, the penalties that have to be paid in particular by women, for any sexual relationship outside of marriage are too heavy. This is manifest as I have, to some extent, pointed out already. Indeed when we consider the difficulties faced in these unions, that so many do take the risks is another proof, if one were needed of the elemental strength of the sex-impulse. But mark this: it is only those whose social conscience is for some reason unawakened who can enter into these irregular relationships except under special and very exceptional circumstances, until some steps have been taken to regulate them. They may be willing to take the risk for themselves, but they know, or perhaps I had better say ought to know, that the payment may fall also on the child of their love. You may say—there need be no children. This is true. It makes the conditions of such love much easier. It is not, however, a solution and can never, I think, be accepted as such by women. The woman who loves a man wants to be the mother of a child by him. I shall be told that there are women of whom this is not true. I know this. But that does not make it less true that the great majority of women can find the completion of their love only in the child.

It would, of course, be easy to raise any number of objections against these contract-partnerships, some of which might well prove true. It may be said, for instance, that the economic difficulties that now prevent marriage would not be lessened, but increased, by these extra-conjugal relationships. This is a question on which so much ought to be said that I feel compelled to say almost nothing, as I cannot now treat it adequately. I can only say that I have in my mind some scheme of insurance, which might easily be contributed to by both partners of the contract, but which would go to the woman for her own provision, and that of any children of the union in case of separation. If this once became established as a custom (a kind of marriage settlement, but without the marriage) necessary between all entering into such partnerships, the practice would gain the support of public opinion. It is done frequently now, but secretly. What I want is that it should be done openly, as a right and not a favour. It would then be possible to take another step in the form of State endowment for parenthood; this might be an extension of endowment for legal motherhood and mother’s pensions, and by doing this would follow another and, perhaps, even greater gain. The recognition of these contract-partnerships would prevent the ostracism which even to-day falls on the discarded mistress. There are many women who dread this much more than poverty. The whole question of any sexual relationships outside of marriage in the past has been left in the gutter, so to speak. Everything has been blotted in darkness and made disgraceful by concealment. This would be changed.

May not something be done now, when in so many directions we are being forced to consider these questions, to establish sanction to meet new needs? Partnerships other than marriage have had a place as a recognised and guarded institution in many older and more primitive societies, and it may be that the conditions brought upon us may act in forcing upon us a similar acceptance.

We have got to recognise that our form of monogamous marriage cannot meet the sex-needs of all people. To assert that it can do this is to close our eyes to the known facts. Something has got to be done. The extending of the opportunities of honourable love must be faced before we can hope for more moral conditions of life. It is the results that have almost always followed these irregular unions that have branded them as anti-social acts. But the desertion of women with the inevitable resulting evils, which has arisen so frequently from the conditions of secrecy under which they now exist, would be put an end to. One reason why extra-conjugal relationships are discredited is because it is often almost impossible to avoid disaster. Make these partnerships honourable and there will be much greater chances of honourable conduct. I spoke just now of the sacrifice of women. But in love there is no such thing as sacrifice for a woman; there is the joy of giving. The sacrifice arises out of the conditions of concealment and blame under which the duties and joys of love so often have had to be fulfilled.

I do not see how we can forbid or treat with contempt any partnership that is openly entered into and in which the duties undertaken are faithfully fulfilled. It is our attitude of blame that has, in the past, so often made this honourable fulfilment of obligations impossible.

I have sought to put these matters as plainly as may be in the conviction that nothing can be gained by concealment. Anyone who writes on the subject of sexual conduct is very open to misconceptions. It is not realised that the effort of the reformer is not to lessen at all the bonds in any sexual partnership, rather the desire is to strengthen them. But the forms of the partnership will have to be more varied; unless, indeed, we prefer to accept unregulated and secret vice. We shall, I do most sincerely believe, have more morality in too much wideness than in too little.

I can anticipate a further objection that will certainly be raised. Why, I shall be asked, if sexual relationships are to be acknowledged and protected outside of marriage, preserve marriage at all? I have answered this question already. Monogamous marriage will be maintained because the great majority of women and men want it to be maintained. I affirm again my own belief in the monogamic union: the ideal marriage is that of the man and woman who have dedicated themselves to each other for the life of both, faithfully together to fulfil the duties of family life. This is the true monogony: this is the marriage which I regard as sanctified. But, I, regarding it as a holy state, would preserve it for those suited for the binding duties of the individual home so intimately connected with it.

The contract-partnerships I have suggested will do nothing to change the sanctity of any true marriages. There will always remain a penalty to those who seek variety in love, in that unrest which is the other side of variety. And the answer I would give to those who fear an increase of immorality from any provision for sexual partnerships outside of permanent marriage is, that no deliberate change in our sexual conduct can conceivably make moral conditions worse than they are at present. As a matter of fact every form of irregular union exists to-day, but shamefully and hidden. The only logical moral objection that I can think of being advanced against an honourable recognition of these partnerships is that, by doing away with all necessity for concealments their number is likely to be larger than if the old penalties are maintained. This is undoubtedly true: it is also true that it is the only possible way in which they can cease to be shamefull. Prohibitions and laws, however stringent, can do nothing. The past has proved their failure; they will fail still worse in the future.

Nor is the change really so great or so startling as at first it may appear to be. Our marriage in its present form is primarily an arrangement for the protection of the woman and the family. What I want is that some measure, at least, of the protection now given to the legal wife, shall be afforded to all women who fulfil the same duties. I am not seeking to make immorality easier; as I have before insisted, that is very far from my purpose. These changes for which I am pleading will make immorality much harder, for it will not be so easy as now it is to escape from the responsibilities of love.

No one can suppose, of course, that this change can be other than gradual. There will be no stage at which a large section of society will give up the accepted custom and stand perplexed as to how they shall readjust their sexual conduct. Any movement towards openness and honesty must be gradual. The process of change will be in the future, what has always happened in the past, the slow abandonment of worn-out conventions, and a trial of new paths, first by the few, to be followed by an ever-increasing number. When the need for a change arises then does a change come.

I assert again there need be no fear.

It is one of the deepest and healthiest instincts of men and women that they have always fought for liberty to love, and have rebelled whenever the restrictions and conditions of society have borne too hardly upon them. There is first a period of dull acquiescence, followed certainly by a reaction towards pleasure and sin—the grabbing to take what has been withheld by any means and in any form; but afterwards comes rebellion—the true movement towards purity; the deep desire of a return to health, necessitating always the breaking through from all hindering barriers, so that the intolerable burden of sin may be cast; a glad imperative effort to gain liberty, to live rightly and joyously.

It is the young who to-day have a new consciousness of the right of freedom. They will never again accept the ancient restrictions. And it is well. We, who are older, whose steps are faltering and whose eyes grow dim with waiting for the vision we have seen, look to them to gain liberty, to re-establish the sanctity of love, which we have tried to do and failed.

But the young must shake off every symptom of the prevalent and contagious anaemia of fatalism that limits everything to the personal issues, before they can formulate and carry through any really constructive work of reform. They must learn to distinguish more clearly between cause and effect, the means and the end. At present they place the horse after the cart and mistake the power for the product. We are all apt to suppose conduct and feelings are the outcome of conditions and laws. They are not: they are the origin of them. When we have all got the desire for right and honourable conduct and honest conduct and honest feelings both about marriage and every form of sexual partnership, we shall get living and helpful laws.

What is the use of tinkering with what is moribund? A great teacher has said, “Let the dead bury their dead; come and preach the good and the new thing.”

CONCLUSION
REGENERATION

I have dared to think of a regeneration of our sexual lives through education and a fuller understanding of the meaning of love. But by education must be understood all that influences the desires and imagination, so that in every direction we shall be turned to seek health and clean living.

Our supine acceptance of so many things that are wrong ought to arouse us to shame. What are we going to do?

Are we content to go on in the muddles that so long we have accepted without much consideration? Are we satisfied to allow all the evil to continue because we are too lazy and too dishonest to face them in truth and demand a clearance? We are all responsible; you, my readers, and I. If we demand saner and more practical conditions we shall get them.

But do we care—I mean care sufficiently to seek and to find the way of escape? Ah, that is the question!

Fear has been the hot-bed wherein have been forced rank plants of shame, dishonesty and trickery, of uncleanness, of concealments, of persecution and punishments—plants of persistent but unhealthy growth, that insistently and riotously spring up to hinder the workers, who strive ever to clear the soil of the fair Garden of Love, from the rank and choking growths.

What wonder, indeed, that we have lost our way so that still we are wandering in the jungle, unable to steer a straight course through the rough and tortuous paths left to us as a legacy from the past. It is this confusion that is hindering us to-day. And our real task is to cut through the jungle, and force clear paths, so that again we may have good roads in an open country on which we may walk gladly and fearlessly.

Yet, it were unwise to be too hopeful. We cannot be architects of life. Each generation will make new mistakes, even do they escape the follies that are old. We can see a very short way along the path of life, and often we are confused. The wisest amongst us are only bricklayers, and the best can but lay two or three bricks in a lifetime. Our work is to do that if we can. We can guess very feebly at the whole design. Many mistakes must be made by us, as they have been by those before us, and often it may be the duty of a new generation to pull down the work that in sorrow we have toiled to build up.