IS PASSIONATE LOVE THE SUREST FOUNDATION FOR MARRIAGE?
“There is no subject,” says Bernard Shaw in the preface to Getting Married, “on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.” And though I disagree rather violently with Mr. Shaw’s views about marriage, he is right here. We do talk dangerous nonsense, which need not matter very much, if we did not think absurdly, and so inevitably have to pay the fruit in wrong action. This explains, I think, our curious levity, our unhappiness, and fierce refusal to face facts.
We have infested our ideals with the poison of pleasure and turned away from essential things. Marriage is not a religion to us—it is a sport.
I say this quite deliberately. I am sure we know better how to engage a servant, how to buy a house, how to set up in business—how, indeed, to do every unimportant thing in life, than we know how to choose a partner in marriage. We require a character with our cook or our butler, we engage an expert to test the drains of our house, we study and work to prepare ourselves for business, but in marriage we take no such sensible precautions; we even pride ourselves that we do not take them. We speak of falling in love, and we do fall.
The conventions of to-day are false; they are bound up with concealments or with an equally untruthful openness. It does not, however, follow from this that mere destruction will be enough, that everyone’s unguided ignorance will lead to success and freedom. The laisser faire system is as false in the realm of marriage as it is in industry and economics. While equally false, though this is rarely recognised, is the modern spiritual view of marriage that love can be found only in perfect harmony of character between the wife and the husband, and is independent of duty. It is true that love differs from lust in its deeper insight into the personality, deeper interest in character, as opposed to the inexpressive smooth outline and “untrained” physical beauty of the body. But the character and intellect may be studied and loved as self-centeredly, as much with a view to the enjoyment of mental excitement, as the body itself.
Of all of which what is the moral? This:
In marriage, as in other things, we fasten our chains about our own necks. We do not find what we desire because we do not know what we want.