It might be thought that if it is so very unnatural the positive couple would instinctively rebel against it?—Not so! How many of them are aware even that it is not a natural law? Custom deceives the young positive couple in the same way as it deceives us all. We are accustomed to innumerable constraints which to a man unfamiliar with them would be intolerably irksome. When, therefore, the young positive couple stand at the altar and hear the priest say to the man: “Wilt thou love her, comfort her, and keep her in sickness and in health, and forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?” and the young positive man answers innocently “I will,” neither of them suspects the cloven hoof of social fear or social constraint behind the words. They imagine not only that the question is a perfectly normal one, implying a normal condition, but they also imagine that this implied condition itself—that of lifelong love—is a possible and generally acceptable proposition. They are not even led to suppose that it is an ideal difficult to realize, otherwise the man would not be invited to take such an enormously difficult vow with so little preparation and warning. To answer the priest’s question honestly—that is to say, with a full knowledge of the terms of the vow and with a perfect conviction that he is ready to fulfil them—a young positive man would require to be in possession of knowledge regarding himself and the future which he can hardly be expected to possess. For a man to say on March 20, 1922, that, if he live so long, he will entertain the same æsthetic or moral or political sentiments on March 20, 1952, as those he holds on the day he makes the vow, would be daring—or to say the least, presumptuous—as implying a claim to a gift of prophecy. But for a man to say of a sentiment in which passion enters as an important factor, that he will hold it thirty years hence, he must either be quite ignorant of what he is being asked to declare, or a prophet capable of accurately reading the future; or else he must be the most unprincipled blackguard that ever lived, and prepared to take any vow in order to obtain his immediate needs. Now, since it would be unfair to assume that the majority of the young men who answer “I will” to that question are blackguards; since, moreover, it would be unscientific to suppose that any of them are gifted with the superhuman power of prophecy, we can only conclude that they are completely ignorant of what it means. They are completely ignorant of the whole significance of the marriage rite, and it is their ignorance, coupled with the fact of the force of custom, that enables them to accept the unnatural imposition of the State-ordered marriage as if it were a natural condition. Besides, the young positive couple are, as a rule, not very analytical. The only thing they insist upon with all the impatience of what is called “love,” is union; and since their elders and society seem to offer them the chance of union without black looks and moral indignation, only in legalized “marriage,” they seize society’s offer without thinking much about the question of natural or unnatural solutions of natural problems. Thousands, it is true, do not wait for the unnatural solution.[51] They simply unite and consummate their desire without taking any public vow. Then, however, they find the social machinery for discouraging such simple behaviour so formidable and unrelenting that they are frequently unable to face it, and resort to crime in order to attempt to wipe out the consequences of their action. Unmarried motherhood, with all the moral indignation it provokes; prosecutions for affiliation, and the weekly payments in which they result—are some of the unpleasant menaces that face those who refuse to wait for the State’s conditions before consummating their desire; and, in the end, the great majority, preferring the more peaceable and more generally accepted course, resolve on marriage the moment they feel they must consummate their desire.
The desire that makes the two young positive people wish to unite is called “love.” It is mutual attraction culminating in a condition of mutual irresistibility. It is the power which, in the course of evolution, each has acquired to draw the other into that condition which best serves the purpose of Life and its multiplication.
Now, as we have already pointed out, this power of attraction serves its purpose—multiplication—whether they unite legitimately or illegitimately. Since, however, the purposes of society are best served by their uniting according to certain rules, and since these rules are chiefly designed to secure each party to the union against the evil consequences (to society) of promiscuous mating, it is expedient that the two should be bound together for life; and the marriage tie is made a permanent tie: “Till death us do part,”—that is the ideal aimed at. But in this way a lie is tacitly smuggled by society into the marriage of two young people. Since society’s purposes are best served by a permanent match between the young positive couple, they are led to believe that the desire which the moment before union has drawn them together, and which is called “love,” is also permanent; in fact that it is really the best reason for making the match permanent!
Having once been perpetrated by the social organism, this lie is repeated in all the moral prejudices and saws, all the fairy-tales, the popular novels, the poetry and the songs, of a whole nation—of a whole continent—and soon acquires the sanctity of truth; and he who dares to nail it to the counter as a piece of counterfeit psychology or physiology, is dubbed a cynic, an anarchist, and a misogynist.
We call the emotion “love” which convinces two young people that they had better, on grounds of expediency, accept the State regulations concerning their prospective union, but we have no business to imply by actual words or by suggestion that the desirable permanence of that union, from society’s point of view, will find one of its principal causes in the persistence of the emotion that led to its being consummated. Unfortunately, the advantage to society and to the family of a permanent legal contract, has led to so complete a distortion of the truth, that the majority of young people are led to believe, quite blindly, that it is the enduring power of the emotion itself which justifies the nature of the contract. And everything is done to confirm them in this belief. It is only when they are married that they find how utterly untrue it is.
It is readily admitted that in every generation of human beings there is a percentage, an ever-dwindling percentage in degenerate days, of men and women who are capable of deep and lasting emotions. These rare creatures of profound and enduring passion, to whom change of any sort is distasteful, and who cling faithfully and stubbornly to their hobbies, their pursuits, their ancestral faiths, and their particular taste in literature, music, the graphic arts and food, may and do sometimes evince a steadiness and a stability in their love which makes their monogamic unions exceptionally harmonious and affectionate to the last. But for the average modern couple to claim that they belong to this very small percentage of human beings, is the most contemptible impudence. Even positive couples cannot all be said to belong to this class, and as for the negative couples, whose unions are chiefly an idle pursuit of sensation or else a gratification of vanity, they are as different from these slow-moving, deeply passionate people as if they belonged to a race utterly strange to them. It is therefore essential that, for the vast majority of people, a more sensible, less dramatic, and more realistic colour should be lent to their unions, so that they may enter them with a clearer understanding of the enormous difficulties with which permanent marriage is beset, and with other considerations to support and fortify them, than a trust in a possibility so utterly fantastic as the endurance of their emotions.
When once they are married, it is perfectly true that expediency, economic considerations, and the presence of children frequently convince them that it is better that their union should be permanent; but to call by the name of “love” the reasons which cause them to arrive at this conclusion, is a colossal hoax, the prodigiousness of which would be amusing did it not lead to such untold misery.
But, it may be objected, even if we admit that the legal union, marriage, is as a rule incompatible with lasting “love,” where is the harm, provided that the two objects of the contract, the obtaining of a union between two positive people and the propagation of children on regular and well-ordered lines, be secured? Is it not after all the best solution of the sex problem?
The question whether it is the best solution of the sex problem we must leave undecided for a moment. But to the first part of the question we may now answer definitely that there is harm in any contract based upon a lie, when that lie is one which, connected as it is with the psychological and physiological conditions of a certain common human relationship, is bound to be discovered as a lie by the parties to that relationship.
To allow, however tacitly or implicitly, that society’s unnatural solution of the sex problem is even favourable to the endurance of the emotion which first led the couple to desire union, is harmful in the first place:—