Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

In looking back upon the preceding, it would seem to result clearly that nothing that has been said here contemplates the establishment of a single form—recognised as the only moral one—for sexual life. But since only the fixity possessed by the law is capable of transforming in a profound and permanent manner the feelings and customs of the majority, there is need, for the present, of a new law to support the growth of the higher feelings which will finally render any marriage law unnecessary.

In connection with the course of development of sexual morality it was pointed out that the ecclesiastical and legal establishment of the ideal of monogamy as the only form of sexual morality has had for its result the unconditional acquiescence in the idea that the claims of evolution are in complete agreement with existing laws and customs; with the further result that we are now—through the want of a recognised right to manifold experience—almost in the same position of ignorance as to the form of sexual morality most favourable to the development of the race, as we were a thousand years ago, and that, therefore, the vital needs of the race as well as the individual’s demands of happiness speak for a more extended right to such experiences.

No one knows whether, at the end of the new paths, we shall not again be confronted by the riddle of the sphinx: how the parents are to avoid being sacrificed for the children or the children for the parents. The one thing certain is that on the path we have hitherto followed we have arrived at the sphinx. And all those who have been torn to pieces at its feet are witnesses that on this path mankind did not arrive at the solution of the riddle.

The point of view which has here, throughout, been the leading one is, that in the same degree as life itself becomes the meaning of life human beings will also in all their sensations and all their undertakings become more and more conscious of regard for the race. It is thus only a question of time when the respect of society for a sexual union shall not depend upon the form of cohabitation that makes a couple of human beings become parents, but only upon the value of the children they thus create as new links in the chain of generations. Men and women will then dedicate to their mental and bodily fitness for the mission of the race the same religious earnestness that Christians devote to the salvation of their souls. Instead of divine codes of the morality of sexual relations, the desire of, and responsibility for, the enhancement of the race will be the support of morals. But the knowledge of the parents that the meaning of life is also in their own lives, that they thus do not exist solely for the sake of their children, may liberate them from other duties of conscience which at present bind them in respect of the children, above all that of keeping up a union in which they themselves perish. The home may then more than at present be synonymous with the mother, which—far from excluding the father—contains the germ of a new and higher “right of the family.”

When every life is regarded as an end in itself from the point of view that it can never be lived again; that it must, therefore, be lived as completely and greatly as possible; when every personality is valued as an asset in life that has never existed before and will never occur again, then also the erotic happiness or unhappiness of a human being will be treated as of greater importance, and not to himself alone. No, it will be so also to the whole community—through the life and the work his happiness may give the race or his unhappiness deprive it of.

For himself, as well as for others, the individual will then examine the right of renouncing happiness as conscientiously as he now submits to the duty of bearing unhappiness. The importance to children of their parents’ life together will depend upon the kind of life it is, when it has been seen that when all is said the new generation has most to gain by love being always and everywhere set up as the condition of the highest worth of cohabitation.

This is the rich promise that the new path offers; but the majority cannot see the promise on account of the possible new dangers. It is this dread that still paralyses the courage to dare the untried, in order to win the valuable.

It is astonishing that those who tremble for the future never seek consolation in the past. They would there find, for example, that when the family ceased to be the match-maker, when the guardian could no longer keep a woman in a position of legal incapacity and prevent her marrying—then there were prophecies of exactly the same “dissolution of society and of the family” as are now dreaded in freer forms of matrimony. But the same people who now laugh at the former forebodings are convinced that the latter will be realised; for man believes in nothing so reluctantly as in his own nature’s power of replacing outward bonds with inner ones. And yet, long before the new forms are ready, there is an abundance of the new feelings which are to fill them. Nothing is more certain than that, if feelings were no better than laws, we should never have new laws (Mill). But human beings will never believe in the possibilities of development of their own feelings until they leave off seeking their strength from above. They will never have faith in themselves as pathfinders until they no longer believe themselves “guided.” As soon as a change has taken place, it is regarded “historically,” as a given consequence of “rational” causes and “divine” guidance. But to look historically at the future; to trust in regard to what has not yet happened to the given consequences—for good and evil—of the same constantly operating causes, this does not occur to the guardians of society. Their belief in God’s guidance is always—retrospective.

The believers in Life, on the other hand, know that vital needs were the productive soil of the feelings that gave the pith to those laws, whereof now only the straw remains. But the earth has not exhausted its powers of fertility, any more than the feelings have lost their creative force. The believers in Life, therefore, attach small importance to the old straw, but consider the increasing of the earth’s productiveness of supreme significance.