Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

And not even those women who are pure in the true sense of the word are free from blame in this. Woman—for whom love is a life-and-death matter in a much deeper sense than for man—experiences on the approach of love those tremblings that follow a sunrise for which one has lain awake and waited. Her physico-psychical timidity takes on by turns the expressions, incomprehensible to the man who loves, of dumb avoidance, of abrupt change, of empty girlish giggling, of sullen misunderstanding. And all that is contradictory—not that which is mysterious—in woman stirs the unrest in a man’s blood.

The modern woman’s great distress has been the discovery of the dissimilarity between her own erotic nature and that of man; or rather, she has refused and still refuses to make this discovery and thinks that only the custom of society—with its wholesome severity towards her, its reckless leniency towards him—has brought about the difference which exists and which she would abolish. But while one group proposes to do so by demanding feminine chastity of the man, the other would claim masculine freedom for the woman.

The book world is now full of works on purity, written by men as well as women, of literary tone and otherwise. Now it is the story of a woman who breaks with the man she loves when he confesses his past; now that of a woman who forces her lover to marry another because the latter has borne him a child; and so on to infinity. Finally there is one who takes her life from grief over her husband’s past, which she thinks will ruin their future. Literature is the roll of the drum which announces the approach of the troop—that army of strong women who are to educate men to chastity by denying them their love.

But will it really be the Amazons who will play the leading part in the struggle against man’s erotic dualism? Will not perhaps wisdom be found also in this case in the hope of being able to conquer the evil with the good, not the evil with the worse, by allowing a man awakened by love to the desire of unity to turn again to disunion?

Would not woman accomplish more in the renovation of morals if she stayed with the man she loves, so as with her whole being to let him learn how a woman can suffer and be made happy through a man? The means of salvation for men suffering under erotic dualism may well be an increase of tenderly chaste, delicately feeling, and kindly wise wives. Even such a mother, sister, or friend is a strength to a man. But only the wife who remains a mistress can be sure of victory.

It is true that she cannot efface her husband’s past. But she can create together with him a new and stronger generation. The man who knows what his beloved has suffered through his past; who has seen the wings of her courage lose something of their power, her confidence something of its smile, her joy something of its playfulness—he will in time teach his sons that a man may certainly become once more strong and healthy through happiness in love, but that he cannot win so beautiful and sure a happiness as self-control can prepare; such queenly pride as his victory might have given the loved one, he will never see in her. But if woman is to help man’s struggle for purity, she must for her share take another view of what has been degrading to man’s nature and what has not.

A woman who marries a widower has to go through a pain which will be deep in proportion as her love is personal. She will then wish to be not only her husband’s last, but also his first love; she suffers from all the memories they have not in common. She would fain have sat by his cradle and received his first smile; she longs to have played with him as a sister, to have shared as a friend his troubles and his joys. She envies all who have been able to see him at those stages of his life and in those spiritual conditions that she has not seen. Above all she envies the woman who first saw him made happy by the love she gave him.

But all these sufferings do not bring her to regard the beloved as morally sunken, because before her he has been the husband of another woman. And the same must hold good of earlier relations of love. The man may have developed, through a former marriage or free connection, his powers of giving a personal love, or he may, in the same way, have lost them. If no baseness is connected with these earlier experiences, if he has not degraded himself to voluntary division of his erotic nature—and bought love is always such a degradation—or to contemptible duplicity; if he has not treated any woman as a means, but received and given personality, then he does not enter “impure” into his marriage, even if he has not evidence of abstinence.

At present it is unfortunately often the case that men enter into marriage with deep stains from earlier connections, and it is this circumstance that gives the demand for purity its general applicability.