4. The responsibilities of a family should be understood, and the wife regarded in her utilitarian aspect as a keeper of the home, as a mother, and as a guardian of the home comforts; marriage itself, as the sacred garden of the future of mankind, in which each party to the contract has the privilege of contributing to that future.
5. Differences of temperament and tradition between mates should be avoided. Since ill-health forbids our marrying into our own families (the ideal match), the young must not forget that in going beyond their families for a mate in order to contradict certain hereditary taints—such as gout, or consumption, or cancer, or any other constitutional vice—they need not therefore contradict the virtues and abilities that their particular family line has cultivated; for this leads to decline, and to the procreation of children who have no character and no ability. They should seek, as far as possible, their like in a strange family.[66] The policy of avoiding family taints in too near relations should not be extended into a policy of seeking opposites.
6. If by chance the expected disenchantment does not supervene in a form intolerably acute, when marriage has been taught on these lines, and the two young people discover that they do not necessarily become surfeited of each other with years, then at least the surprise would be pleasant, and not as it always is to-day, the sudden unpleasant realization of complete disillusionment.
Method of Meeting Specific Objections.[67]
(A1) People should be taught quite early how changeable they are. They should be persuaded of the frangibility of their resolutions, vows, and promises, and they should learn how deeply they are wedded to variety before ever they celebrate their final and most fateful wedding.
(2) They should be taught that it is only the exceptions among mankind that have that genius for love which can endure for a lifetime, and they should be shown the hollowness of the popular assumption that every one is capable of une grande passion; therefore, that to arrange their lives as if they were one of these geniuses in love is not only the grossest form of megalomania, but dangerous into the bargain.
(B) The problem here is one belonging to the art of life. Those who can practise this art, and contrive to make themselves always the desired object of the spouse, have overcome one of the principal difficulties of monogamic marriage. The French are perhaps the most successful European people at practising this art—hence the high percentage of happy marriages in France.
(C) If the approval of each party to the match is understood merely to mean the recognition by each of the necessity of an adequate physical adaptation, and the unconscious desire for this physical adaptation in each is discounted from the enthusiasm felt for the other as mate, then it will be seen that the residue, which will be a pretty tepid feeling, is by no means the outcome of an overvaluation of the individual, and the contempt need not arise.
In other words, teach the girl to subtract the need and the desire for physical adaptation from her love of the man, and teach the man to do the same in regard to the girl, and what remains will quickly be seen to consist only of a strong personal regard, which can hardly lead to the contempt that would otherwise result if the enthusiasm on both sides were supposed to arise from the unaided charms of either party to the match.
(D) The remedy here is the same as for (C). If a man realizes that when a girl protests her undying love for him the bulk of the ardour she feels is provoked merely by him as her physical adaptation—by him qua male—and that his individual traits play only a minor part, he will be less likely to believe that he is capable of provoking a life-long passion because a girl approved of him as her mate. It is a simple idea to grasp. Both the girl and the man should always reflect how much nature is helping them towards their success. When the declaration of life-long love came, it could then be estimated at its proper worth, without either party fancying that any exceptional fascination in themselves had been the principal power at work.