TO-DAY’S IDEAS ON MARRIAGE
ARE WE SEEKING VAINLY AFTER HAPPINESS?
The love-story of to-day differs in one essential way from the love-story of yesterday. Yesterday’s love-story always had a youthful hero and heroine, and ended with the marriage bells. To-day’s, which is a far harder love-story to write, begins with marriage. Moreover, the bride and bridegroom are rarely young, nor are they ravishingly beautiful.
Earlier authors in short, shirked the real problem of marriage. They ended where they should have begun. For the main difficulties, in that always difficult adventure of the two learning to live as one, do not lie in youth, the period of quick adaptation, of easy falling in love. The trouble does not often begin in the courtship or honeymoon days; but it comes later in the struggle to harmonise and bend the character to the demands and lessons of marriage, and in the continued effort of maintaining love after knowledge of love has come. There is the difficulty. The preservation of love when all the passionate preliminaries are over.
Love is not walking round a rose garden in the sunshine; it is living together, working together. And the honeymoon is as trifling as the hors d’oeuvre in comparison with wedded life, and as unable to satisfy the deep needs of women and men. And the greatest difficulty rests in the fact that very few of us understand what our deeper needs are. Even to ourselves we are strangers. That is one reason why marriage is always difficult.
You see so often the partner one falls in love with does not make a good life companion. It’s all very well to moralise, but you can hardly ever be certain beforehand how these relations will turn out. There is physical attraction and passion, and there is affection—just being pals with each other. Who is to know which is the more necessary—the better for happiness of these two? You ought to have both, but few couples are so fortunate as that. We are almost all of us divided in our desires and our wills as also in our love.
The boys or girls to-day are, I think, more natural. There is much greater openness and less pretence. Even our novelists frankly say that every woman looks with special interest on a well formed man. There is no convention marking this as improper, “the baser side of love.” We Victorians were everlasting children in an everlasting nursery; we did not play with love, but we fiercely refused seriousness towards the fundamental emotions. Perhaps that is why we lost the old firm tradition of marriage and its duties, and why we have succeeded in putting nothing in its place.
The disease of our wills and the sickness of our souls has rust-eaten into marriage. We are doing nothing because we are too frightened to be serious. We have sought to drown our unhappiness and the exhaustion of our souls, to fill emptiness with pleasure; to place the personal good in marriage above the racial duty; to forget responsibility, and, in so doing, inevitably we have turned aside from essential things.
We have missed happiness in trying to grab at it.
Cannot you see what is wrong? We are so terribly tired of this search for something that we never find. We are like little lost children, we run, this way and that, we cry and make much noise, in fear, seeking for our mothers. Yes, our adventures are the tricks of the child who fantasies so as to pretend that everything is right when in reality everything is wrong.