PLAYING WITH LOVE
Many girls to-day try deliberately to keep love light. Shrewd enough to understand the heavy claims of serious love affairs that lead to marriage, they prefer flirtations of weeks only—episodes that are a secret and, as it were, detachable part of their lives.
It is a dangerous state.
Emotional power and the enjoyment of the simple pleasures of life are dried up by such constant stimulation. A new diet of excitement must always be provided. The object of life is to cheat time and to crowd out boredom. Whatever is going on they must be in it from a jazz dance or river picnic to a church bazaar.
In the old days it used to be only duties for girls—now it is rights and pleasure with the demand to be left to make their own lives. There is a turning away from duty; a hatred of anything dull.
Girls as I have just shown you want love as an experience and to provide the always desired excitement. They do not want to marry and to settle down.
Thus while condescending to fascinate men, while deliberately seeking attention these young women still hold themselves in hand. Intending to exploit life to the uttermost they find love amusing, but they fight always against its being a vocation.
There is calculation and dangerous hardiness in their attitude to their lovers.
Their transitory love affairs are, indeed, regarded in very much the same way as formerly they were regarded by the average young men—as enjoyable and thrilling incidents of which they are ashamed only when they are talked about and blamed.
With no sex conscience, these wantons of excitement have no consciousness of womanly responsibility. Each new affair affords an eagerly snatched tribute to a colossal and restless vanity.
This is one type of woman who to-day plays with love.
There are as well other girls of a different character, less concerned with pleasure, less consciously vain, more emotional, and to men more interesting. They are incessantly thinking of their own personalities; and, for this reason, they are equally, even if not more, harmfully destructive in the utter misery they often create.
These are the girls who are always emotion hunting.
Impossible to tell what are their pseudo-feelings. A sort of sterile passion, which expends itself in their failure to know, and find, what they want.
They do not wish consciously to escape the responsibilities of marriage; indeed they seek unceasingly the perfect man to whom they may surrender their freedom. But they suffer from a formless discontent that rots into every love and prevents them finding satisfaction.
Consumed with haggard restlessness, such girls pass their days in a dangerous state of expectancy and nervous tiredness. Eternally they are unsatisfied without knowing why.
Born spiritual adventurers, these worshippers of emotionalism, attitudinising and thinking perpetually of themselves, desire at all cost a position in the limelight. They love romantically, but rarely are they strong enough to obey their inclinations. Such girls are out on an eternal quest; and, every now and again, they believe they have found the ideal man they are seeking. Then they discover they have not found him, so their search is taken up anew. While often their insistent egoism, which causes them to ignore the rights of others and all social obligations, drives them into dangerous corners; does not give them a chance; turns them to use mean weapons of deceit; forces them into false situations that too often close around them like a trap.
Many other nobler types, besides these two, have been playing with love.
Girls of profound and steadfast emotional nature are rare. The great majority of girls certainly are not entirely light-minded, but they are less serious, more noisily determined to do what they want, to get what they can both out of men and out of life. They are very like children, playing at desperate rebels, who take up weapons to use far more deadly than they know.
All this playing with love is detestable—all of it. It bears witness to a poverty of emotion and a shameful shirking of responsibility.
Women are the custodians of manners in love. The future rests with them. And this responsibility cannot safely be set aside, dependent as it is on forces active long before human relations were established—forces which press on women back and back through the ages.
Yes, woman has laid upon her the sacred necessity of seriousness in all that is connected with Love. It is a duty imposed upon her by Nature, and one that she cannot escape. That is why there is so much danger in these restless neurotic years, when girls are too excited to be serious.