Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

The same feeling has possessed many a man before our time. One of them was Eugène Delacroix, who speaks in his journal of the pain of only being able to show to each of his friends the aspect of himself which that friend understood, and of thus being obliged to become another for each of them, without ever feeling himself completely understood; a suffering for which he only knew one remedy, une épouse qui est de votre force.

But what is new about it is that this sentiment has become diffused and has taken shape in the consciousness of the many; that it is beginning to set its stamp upon the whole spirit of the age.

Meanwhile, mankind continues to be guided by erotic impulses which lie deep below its conscious erotic needs. Man’s senses are spurred by a desire which thrusts aside that of the soul. The culture of the idea of love is far in advance of the instincts of love. And thus our time is brimful of love-conflicts.

To this must be added that the increased sensibility of modern man has rendered him more and more inclined to wear masks, protective disguises, artistically decorated armour. Protection is indispensable, since no one would be able to endure life if he were hourly seeing the ill-bound or still open wounds of others, or feeling his own touched by anyone. Existence would lose much of its excitement without secrets, suspected or unsuspected, in the destinies and souls of men. But at the same time this protection renders love’s struggle to penetrate appearances more and more difficult. Therefore a certain form of “flirtation” serves as the attempt of awakening love to tear off the mask, to outwit the protective disguise, a game of fence which aims at the joints of the tight-fitting armour.

But the attempts are often unsuccessful and life is more and more crowded with destinies that have miscarried, while more and more people wring their hands in solitude over what might have been! Man feels more deeply than ever before that life gave him a poor portion, when his love has been nothing but sinking in an embrace. An ever greater number know that love is absorption into that spirit, in which one’s own finds its foothold without losing its freedom; the nearness of that heart which stills the disquiet in our own; that attentive ear which catches what is unspoken and unspeakable; the clear sight of those eyes which see the realisation of our best possibilities; the touch of those hands which, dying, we would feel closed on our own.

When two souls have joys which the senses share, and when the senses have delights which the souls ennoble, then the result is neither desire nor friendship. Both have been absorbed in a new feeling, not to be compared with either taken by itself, just as the air is incomparable with its component elements. Nitrogen is not air, nor is oxygen; sensuousness is not love, nor is sympathy. In combination they are the air of life and love. If either of the component elements is in the wrong proportion to the other, then love—like air—becomes too heavy or too rarefied. But as the proportions between oxygen and nitrogen may within a wide limit vary without disadvantage, so also may the components of love. Affinity of soul is doubtless the most enduring element in love, but not therefore the only valuable one; the love that fills life with intoxication is separated from even the most lofty friendship by an ocean as deep as that which divides the India of legend from utilitarian America—a lifetime in which will not equal a single day in the other!

Great love arises only when desire of a being of the other sex coalesces with the longing for a soul of one’s own kind. It is like fire, the hotter it is, the purer; and differs from the ardour of desire as the white heat of a smelting-furnace differs from the ruddy, smoking flames of a torch carried along the streets.

The constantly increased importance of sympathy in the life of the soul finds expression, however, at the present time within the feminine world in an over-estimation of friendship, both between one woman and another and in relation to love. A passionate worship between persons of the same age—or of an elder by a younger member of the same sex—is among women as among men the customary and beautiful morning glow of love, which always pales after sunrise. An entirely personal, great friendship is, on the other hand, as rare as a great love, and equally rare among women as among men. Those who expect to find the complement of their being in friendship have therefore no greater prospect of attaining the essential in this sphere, and moreover they run the risk of missing it in the sphere of love, through shutting themselves off from or impoverishing themselves of love’s emotions. The women of older times also cultivated friendship. But they did not content themselves with it in the place of love. And if women were once seriously to do this, then winter would have come upon the world. The way of evolution is to demand of love all that friendship affords—and infinitely more! But the rich spiritual intercourse between female fellow-workers and fellow-students, as also between comrades of different sexes, is now preparing the third historical stage of development, that of individual sympathy. It is true that great love has been individually sympathetic in all ages. What is new is that an ever greater number of spirits are guided by the same need; that the possibility of great love has become apparent to many, not only to a chosen few. Just as we have been able to gauge the revival of love by the diminution of marriages of convenience, by the recognition of young people’s liberty of choice, and by the popular condemnation of marriages for money, so can we now measure the strength of the new revival by other, equally significant phenomena; those, namely, called “the new immorality.” It has been said with truth that love as it now is—the great psychological reality with which one has to reckon—in its present complicated, manifold, and refined condition, is the result of all the progress of human activity: of the victory of intelligence and sentiment over crude force, of the transformation in the relations between man and woman which new economic, religious, and ethical ideas have brought about; of the growing desire for inward and outward beauty, of the will to ennoble the race, and other causes. But among these we have not named the most important, that in which many now see a sign of degeneration, but which is really one of development, the cause on which rests the hope of the final abolition of erotic dualism: the conciliation of the excessive opposition of sex.

So long as man and woman are so divided in their erotic needs as is at present often the case, love will be the “everlasting conflict” described by those poets and thinkers who see only the immediate present, without faith in the development of love or mankind’s education in loving; for in the midst of the age of evolutionism men neither think nor feel according to its doctrines. To him, however, who does so feel, nothing is more certain than that “the everlasting conflict” will one day end in the conclusion of peace.

The sceptics just referred to smile ambiguously at the mention of friendship between women, as at that of the refinement and craving for sympathy in woman’s love. It is not until a mistress or a wife, misunderstood in the depths of her being, leaves him, that such a man discovers that the being he believed himself to be making entirely happy, has not even had her senses satisfied—since the soul received nothing from the senses and gave them nothing.