SENTIMENT AND CALCULATION IN SEXUAL SELECTION
Youth, beauty, health, finery and flirtation excite the sexual appetite. Many other sentiments are accessory, such as admiration, the pleasure of possession, respect, pity, etc. Inclination is an important element, but in no way necessary to sexual union.
In the lower stages of human development, tenderness toward children is much stronger than sexual love. Among many savage races the love of a man for his wife is completely wanting, as well as that of the wife for her husband. In this case marriage depends on reciprocal convenience, on the desire to have children, and profits by personal comfort and the satisfaction of a purely animal sexual appetite. However, among these people the parents have a tender regard for their children. The husband has the right to beat his wife, but the wife is considered as unnatural or even criminal if she beats her children. Among the North American Indians, for example, conjugal love is, so to speak, unknown. On the other hand, in other savage races, such as the Touaregs, the Niam-Niams, the New Caledonians, the Tonganese and Australians, the conjoints have a deep affection for each other, and the husband often commits suicide on the death of his wife. On the whole, the sentiments of affection of the conjoints are the result of a long sexual life in common, and they are especially strengthened by the love of the parents for their children.
As a rule, the mutual attachment of conjoints for each other among cultivated races is developed along with altruism. The tenderness and refinement of love as they exist at the present day among highly civilized races were unknown to most savages and to the older civilizations. In China it is considered good manners to beat the wife, and when a poor Chinaman treats his wife with consideration, it is to avoid having to buy another. What the Arab understands by love is only sexual appetite, and among the ancient Greeks it was nearly the same.
In civilized Europe mental culture progresses in the direction of equality of rights between the two sexes, so that a man regards his wife more as a companion who is his equal and no longer a slave. Community of interests, opinions, sentiments and culture constitute a primary condition for sentiments of mutual sympathy and favors affection. No doubt, excitation of the sexual appetite by contrasts acts here as an antagonistic force. Contrast should not be so great as to exclude sympathy.
Too great difference in age is dangerous for attachment, for it causes too great a divergence in the aims and interests of life. Education and social equality also favors love, and this tends to preserve class distinction. It is rare for a well-educated man to fall in love with a peasant, or a laboring man with an educated woman, except in a sensual way. Men generally avoid marriage with individuals of another race, or of another religion.
Endogamy and exogamy do not form such an absolute contrast as at first sight might appear. Even among exogamous races, there is a limit which must not be passed. These races often prohibit marriage with individuals of another race. Among the Arabs, for example, the instinct of ethnical separation is so strong, that the same Bedouin wife who will prostitute herself for money with Turks or Europeans, would think it dishonorable to marry one of them. In this way custom produces endogamy of caste and class among the same people. The same with the nobility; in ancient Rome it was forbidden for a patrician to marry a plebeian. Sometimes an endogamy of religious origin is met with, among the Jews for example.
Children are treasures for the man of low culture, while they become a burden to the cultivated man. In spite of this the natural man ardently desires children. In Switzerland, two-fifths of the divorces occur in sterile unions, although the latter only form one-fifth of all marriages.
Calculation often smothers sentiment when it becomes the basis of marriage. We live to-day under the sway of Mammon, with the result that the influence of love, strength, beauty, capacity for work, intelligence, skill, character and even health, count for little compared with money in the question of marriage. This sad sign is really a new form of marriage by purchase, hypocritically disguised.