The very word love is used in so general and indiscriminate a way to denote sometimes the most transitory impulse and sometimes the most intense feeling, that a mass of misunderstanding arises. The emotion which most often passes under the name of love is a maudlin, sickly sentiment or passion founded on hypocrisy, which means nothing at bottom but the desired enjoyment of a passion which is felt but not understood, and which professes to be everything but that which it is in reality.
With more courage to face truth, we should have a surer ideal; there would be much less sentimentality, but much deeper feeling about marriage. Our romance is slightly vulgar. Vulgarity is a sign of weakness of spirit, that spirit which is “the life that carves out life” as Nietzsche says.
We associate romance with courtship and not with marriage. “Thank God our love-time is ended!” cried a north country bride on the day that marriage ended her long engagement.
Now, I do not know whether this delightful story is true, but it does illustrate the attitude of many ordinary couples, whose love adventure ends at the very hour it should begin.
Every marriage ought to be a succession of courtships.
A very slight knowledge of existing marriages is sufficient to convince even the most optimistic believer that true mating is hard. I do not believe that most marriages are unhappy, but I do know that only the very few are happy. With many perhaps, and even with those who are passionate lovers, the attraction of sex always seems to fall short of its end; it draws the two together in a momentary self-forgetfulness, but for the rest it seems rather to widen their separateness. They are secret to one another in everything; united only in the sexual embrace.
Can we, then, ever find perfect love? Is it not like exercise of the body? You can develop it to a certain point, but not beyond, without danger; and very slowly, with continued patient effort. Do we not need exercise of the soul? I do not know. Often I feel I know nothing. To some men and women it is all simple enough, a woman is just a woman and a man is a man. The trouble begins when any woman becomes the one desired woman and any man the one desired man.
There is gain and development in this selective tendency of Love—and yet, if I am right, there is terrible danger lurking in the application of this egoistic spiritual view.
We may not safely ask too much or too little from marriage or take too high or too low a view of it.
I am not very hopeful of improvement. At least, not for a long time, and never unless we learn to be more honest about ourselves and about love.