Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

The great danger to this evolution is that women never take sufficient account of sensuousness, nor men of spirituality. And it is especially woman who now one-sidedly applies her own erotic nature—with its warm penetration, its completeness that frees it from temptation—as the ethical and erotic standard for that of man with its sudden heat, its dangerous incompleteness.

It is without doubt a feminine exaggeration to say that a “pure” woman only feels the force of her sex’s need when she loves. But the enormous difference between her and man is that she cannot obey this need without loving. It is doubtless true that besides her love a woman may have a calling in life. But the profound distinction between her and man is at present this: that he more often gives of his best as a creator than as a lover—while for her the reverse is nearly always the case. And while thus man is appraised by himself and others according to his work, woman in her heart values herself—and wishes to be valued—according to her love. Not until this is fully appreciated and working for happiness does she feel her own worth. It is no doubt true that woman also wishes to be made happy by man through her senses. But while this longing in her not unfrequently awakes long after she already loves a man so that she could give her life for him, with man the desire to possess a woman often awakes before he even loves her enough to give his little finger for her. That with women love usually proceeds from the soul to the senses and sometimes does not reach so far; that with man it usually proceeds from the senses to the soul and sometimes never completes the journey—this is for both the most painful of the existing distinctions between man and woman. It is quite certain that both man and woman are humbled by their great love, and that the knowledge of having awakened reciprocal love turns even the freethinker into a believer in miracles. But man often conceals his humility behind a security which wounds the woman; she, on the other hand, hides hers in an uncertainty which wounds the man. And from this difference of instinct arises a new kind of complication, when man also has begun to desire an unspoken understanding on the part of woman; when he becomes convinced of her love only when she has guessed this and loved his reticence itself. But against this conscious and refined will of the modern man stands his hereditary instinct of a conqueror. And no woman is more sure of all the older as well as all the newer sufferings of love than she who really acts according to the words of her lover: that he will accept love only from a woman who herself has the courage to declare it to him. For, on the other side, the primitive desire of being captured survives in woman. And therefore also her strongest instincts come into conflict with her newly acquired courage in action.

For all these reasons it is difficult for a person of the present day to believe himself loved or to know that he is loved.

And it is this which will preserve to love its excitement, even when the animal habits—with pursuit on one side and flight on the other—have gradually ceased. Conflict and the intoxication of victory will always form a part of the vital stimulation and pleasurable emotion of love,—but they will be removed to a higher plane. Man’s forward rush to win a woman who perhaps would not otherwise have remarked him; woman’s turning aside to egg the man on, or else to defend in some measure the independent decision of her feelings, will be transformed by the desire of each to wait until the other has chosen. The erotic tension will then be released in the contest for the most refined expressions of sympathy, the most convincing assurances of comprehension, the most rapidly vibrating sensitiveness to the other’s moods, the fullest communication of confidence. Victory will mean a constantly deeper penetration into the other’s nature, an ever richer fulness and joy in the communication of one’s own; a constantly growing faith as regards what is mysterious, and a like gratitude for what is revealed. The stimulation will be renewed daily in moods the transitions of which are as imperceptible as those of the evening sky from the reddest gold to the purest white; in the border lines of sympathy and antipathy, now fine as a straw, now broad as a river. It will be renewed through the test of innumerable uniting and repellent emotions, as rapidly and irrevocably decisive as the fall of a star in space, or of a silver piece in the river.

And this tension of married life will not be relaxed as now by the puffed-up arrogance of proprietorship on the part of the man or by dull complaisance on that of the woman. Since all sense of happiness is connected with the exertion of force to attain an end and with the equilibrium that results from its attainment, it has been the misfortune of love that courtship has absorbed all the tension, and married life the subsequent equilibrium. Only the sense of impending loss—through life or through death—has, as a rule, evoked a new spiritual tension. This, for reasons mentioned above, has especially concerned the husband. Wives have often suffered long from the self-satisfied comfort of the daily life of marriage before they have resigned the peace of consummation, the equilibrium without movement, which was their dream of happiness.

But now women will no longer resign, nor allow themselves to be cheated of life. More and more their demand for a new love becomes one with the demand for a new marriage, the chief value of which will not, as now, consist in “security and calm.”

Woman knows—and man still more—that it is in periods of calm, when all vital stimulation is wanting, that the temptation comes to seek it in new relations. But at the same time they are beginning to see that when one and the same feeling affords an unceasing excitement—through the desire of constantly attaining higher conditions of that feeling—then such temptation becomes of necessity less and less dangerous, simply because the human soul can only with great difficulty transfer the spiritual wealth it has accumulated in one place. Love in its impersonal form is movable capital, easily realised. In its personal form, on the other hand, it is fixed property, which increases in value the more one sinks in it, and which, owing to its very nature, is difficult to disperse.

Whenever a woman has captivated a man with a lifelong fascination, the secret has been that he has never exhausted her; that she “has not been one, but a thousand” (G. Heiberg); not a more or less beautiful variation on the eternal theme of the female sex, but a music in which he has found the wealth of inexhaustibility, the enticement of impenetrability, while she has given him an incomparable happiness of the senses. The more the modern woman acquires courage for a love as rich in the senses as in the soul, the more complicated and self-inclosed her personality becomes, the more will she obtain that power which is now only the fortunate advantage of the exceptional.

Man tells woman that her new way of love is opposed not only to man’s nature but to the welfare of the new generation.