Men, Women, and God / A Discussion of Sex Questions from the Christian Point of View

by A. Herbert Gray

To begin with, a good many unhappy husbands are idle men. Having no hard work to which they must give themselves daily, they have to try to find interest in life in some other way. And because there is no other way they inevitably find themselves threatened with boredom. While their love was new it seemed to them that it would fill life for ever with romance and joy, but so soon as the first early stages of marriage were past they found it failing them. Such men almost always become moody or restless or irritable, and if they are much at home their wives have to try to humor them through their troubles. It is more than any woman ought to be asked to do, and more than any woman can continuously accomplish. If such men came home in the evening honestly tired through trying to do something worth doing they would find their homes a delightful solace. But life's problem cannot be solved by an idle man, whether he be married or unmarried.

And the same is true for idle wives, though there are not so many of them. When a woman has turned over to her servants all household cares and even the care of her children that she may run after pleasure she has chosen to live on terms which never yet made anybody lastingly happy. We are by nature too big for that way of life, and sooner or later it fails to make us even content. Love will light up with a wonderful color lives that are given to honest work, but even love cannot make idleness other than a wearisome career. Then there are couples who have refused to have children. If the reason be that some possibility of disease has made it seem wrong to have children, it may be that both will learn to adapt themselves to this limitation and to achieve happiness in spite of it. Thousands of couples who are childless against their own wills have learnt none the less to live together in lasting happiness. But when childlessness is the result of a mere selfish policy, it often revenges itself upon the couple concerned. They have deliberately refused satisfaction to one of the deepest instincts within them, and though they may not realize it, those suppressed instincts destroy their harmony of being. They do not face the fact that they have such instincts, because they could not meet them with any adequate reason for suppressing them. They try to deceive themselves into believing that the instincts are not there, or they repress them from selfish causes, and life does not let them off. Love remains unsatisfied. Its august claims have been refused. And therefore it does not and cannot continue to bring them joy.

Another reason for unhappy marriages I have already spoken of in a previous chapter. Sometimes they were marriages of passion and not of love. Sometimes men and women allow themselves to be hurried into union by the driving force of an almost impersonal thing that is purely physical in nature, and though they think they are acting out of love, they are leaving out the larger part of their natures. Mind and spirit may have had no part at all in the transaction. And after such a step there is bound to come a painful awakening. After a while he or she will find that in the most intimate part of married life only the body is acting, and then two people who have got very close to one another in one respect may yet find that they are still in many ways strangers to each other. That must always be a most critical situation. I believe that a successful way out of it might almost always be found, if only the two concerned would use much patience and would learn mutual accommodation. But patience is not a universal possession either among men or women, and often rash and foolish things are said or done at such times which seem to break hopelessly the house of dreams which up till then had seemed so beautiful and so permanent.

If only men and women could learn that the love which makes happy marriages is not mere passion, though it involves passion, a world of troubles might be avoided.

The plain though unpalatable truth about a great many marriages is that, though there was love in them at the beginning, there was not enough of it. Often there was enough to make the man eager and delighted to enjoy his wife when she was happy, but not enough of it to make him able and willing to help her when she was depressed. There was enough to make each able to take delight in the charms of the other, but not enough to make either willing to forgive the faults in the other, and help him or her to conquer them. There was enough for sunny days but not enough for foggy ones—enough to produce laughter but not enough to beget patience—enough for admiration but not enough for understanding—enough for joy in the other's successes but not enough for helpfulness after the other had failed. Perhaps a woman will always seem in some ways a queer creature to a man. It is certain that no man has always understood any woman. And I suppose a man always seems at times a strange, childish, and primitive being to a woman, so that she also fails to achieve understanding. But when understanding has failed love is put to one great test. Nothing can get a couple through times when understanding has failed, except love. But love can do it when there is enough of it.

Nor is that the hardest thing love has to do. There come times when, because nobody is always good, and most of us are often bad, love has to face the plain fact of sin in the loved object. At such times to approve is impossible, and would be a real disloyalty. To break out into mere reproaches is futile and irritating. To do nothing is to let a seed of separation sink into the common life. Yet the situation can be met. It can be met by real love, because love can forgive. Forgiveness does not mean condoning wrong. It does not mean blindness, which is never a helpful thing. It means loving the person who has stumbled in spite of the fact, and even perhaps just because of it. It is at such times that one who has failed most needs love, and when therefore love gets a supreme chance. But if a husband or a wife has not enough love to take that chance, then marriage may fail.

And here I am not talking about exceptional cases. Whoever you are, if you marry you are going to marry a sinner—a man or a woman who will some day fall below his best self or her best self. And just because you love it will bring you acute pain. You would do well to ask yourself beforehand what you are going to do about it. And if you cannot feel that you could forgive and go on loving all the same, you would do well to think again. The whole story of some unhappy marriages is told in one sentence. There was love in them, but not enough to produce forgiveness. Yet the ultimate proof that true love is divine in origin lies just in the fact that true love can forgive.

All of which leads me on to the real reason why I write this chapter. Marriages often fail because people often fail, and people fail ultimately for one central reason—that they have not God in their lives. I have read as much modern fiction as most people. And while I have plodded through elaborately told tales of the sufferings of married people, my amazement has grown that these tales are almost without exception the stories of people who had no conscious relation to God. Their authors seem to think it a most interesting thing that such lives should go wrong, and they base upon that fact the suggestion that life is essentially a tragic and rather disappointing matter. To me nothing seems more inevitable and more entirely explicable than that on such terms life should fail, and should fail alike for the married and the unmarried. What could be more simple!

The essential greatness of man lies in the fact that he is capable of fellowship with God. It is in realizing that fellowship that he truly comes to himself. In nothing less than that can he ultimately find satisfaction. The reason why all lesser experiences fail him is just that he was made for something greater still. These lesser experiences will carry him through the morning of life and past the usual time for marriage. But later on the unalterable facts about his nature begin to assert themselves. Though he does not always know it—often indeed does not know it—he begins to need his God. And till he finds God he is wrongly related to the whole universe. Though he will generally fight against it a certain sadness threatens to settle on his spirit. He will try all the old joys; and though he may pronounce them still good, a quiet voice within will pronounce them not good enough. He cannot live even on human love, and a disturbing force will begin to trouble him even when he is with the wife he has loved so well. And so marriage begins to fail.

I find the psychologists saying this with their peculiar vocabulary. They tell us that the individual has to achieve certain adaptations if he is to find his harmonious and balanced life. One of these is the adaptation to society; another is the adaptation to sex, and a third is the adaptation to the infinite. If for "adaptation to the infinite" we put the time-honored phrase "reconciliation with God," then psychologists and religious teachers will be found saying identically the same thing. And all three adaptations are necessary. Adaptation to sex alone is not enough. For those who do know God it turns out that their human fellowship based on love becomes so entirely at one with the divine fellowship, that the two almost cease to be felt as two and certainly the human fellowship is enormously enriched. But where the divine fellowship is a thing unknown a certain deep-seated weariness and loneliness will possess the man, let his human love be never so wonderful.