Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

It is from similar sexual customs that the majority of our Swedish people derive theirs—that people which in royal and academic speeches has gained the character of being “the most law-abiding and loyal” in the world. Failing a deeper love or a sense of responsibility, these customs involve the abandonment of the woman, infanticide, and sometimes the prostitution of the woman, when she has passed from one man to another; finally the encumbrance of society with the children of different fathers to whom she has given life, besides the neglect of the children. And the custom leads—even in those cases where both love and responsibility are present, but where the lovers are too young—to the enfeebling of themselves and of the children, and to the great mortality of the latter. Not only hard labour and scanty food, but also a premature sexual life, contribute to hinder the full bodily development of the lower classes and to hasten their growing old.

But by the side of these evil effects there are good ones. In most cases, a young couple’s prospect of parentage leads their relatives to make their marriage possible. When this cannot take place immediately, the daughter and her child stay with the parents of one of them, or she leaves the child with them, while she on her side, and the young man on his, work for the future. Even when the man has not always been disposed for marriage, their common life of work and the sense of parentage soon show a uniting force. Such couples who have come together in youth probably have better prospects for their life together than an upper-class couple, worn out by a long engagement, in which the bride has a full right to her orange-flowers—to say nothing of the health contributed by the man of the people in comparison with the majority of men of the upper class, who have bought their injurious substitute for marriage while waiting for the promotion which should make marriage possible. One thing at any rate is certain: that matrimonial fidelity among the people is as great as freedom before marriage is unlimited. That the free love of the peasant and working class ends, as a rule, in marriage, often depends on the fact that public opinion supports this as a point of morality. But—in those cases where love itself does not bring about community of life—the sense of parentage and the need of a helpmate are as decisive as public opinion; for even among the erotically undeveloped the need of cohabitation makes itself felt for other purposes than the instinct of the race. It is the desire for such community of life—with its sharing of pleasure and hardship, sorrow and attention—which makes it really uniting. Where no such desire exists, the relationship becomes immoral from the point of view of life-enhancement. If this standard of morality be not adhered to, free love among the upper class—as among the lower class—will, it is true, contribute to the abolition of prostitution, but not to the exaltation of mankind through a greater love, a higher morality.

For if, on the one hand, the sexual customs of the lower class allow more right than those of the upper class to the direct claims of nature, on the other hand, the customs of the latter still provide the same opportunities for the elevation into love of the instinct which, from an historical and ethnographical point of view, has everywhere been provided by self-control. Among those nations with which sexual connections begin early, morals are, as a rule, loose, and where morals are loose, the emotion of love has small importance. The control of sensuality develops the deeper feelings of love. We need not go to the nations of the past, or to existing extra-European peoples, but only to the town and country labourers of our own and other European lands, to see how the feelings become lax and feeble, the senses coarse and greedy, when they have acquired the habit of satisfying physical hunger before that of the soul has awakened. The miserable conditions of dwelling among the lower classes are enough by themselves to rob sexual life of its discretion; immature age or the tie of blood is frequently no hindrance to unchastity, and its consequences—coarseness and lack of responsibility towards one another as well as towards the offspring—at times take hideous forms. The first condition therefore for love’s freedom is that the freedom shall concern love, the most universal sign of which is the desire of continued community of life. As this sign is, as a rule, to be found among young people of the educated class who now claim love’s freedom, they are thus far within their rights, as also are the young people of the lower class when they use the same freedom and as a result form many excellent connubial unions. We could with every reason—and with more reason—draw the same conclusions with regard to the upper class, if it were not the case that among these love has become a so much more penetrating force. While the majority of the working class—for even there a minority with more refined erotic feelings is to be found,—in addition to the satisfaction of its instincts, contents itself with a capable and devoted comrade to bear its burden, the developed man or woman of the present day has deeper erotic needs. It is the satisfaction of these that is often missed by a youthful decision in life; for even when youthful love is soulful—and nearly all youthful love can so be described—it is nevertheless in most cases a longing for love rather than love, a craving for experience rather than the new life itself. And therefore the erotic feelings of early youth are founded upon the illusions which make a Romeo lament the harshness of Rosalind a moment before meeting Juliet, and a Titania to fondle Bottom’s ass’s ears. Never in after life has the world such a marvellous glamour as when the first dream of love has swathed all contours in its opalescent mists of sunrise, but—never do we so easily go astray. It may happen that the lifting of the mists will disclose the most beautiful landscape. But there are more chances that the course one has steered in the fog will end in one of many shipwrecks. Therefore the “’teens” should be the age of the erotic prologue, not of the drama. For this reason also, that no one can decide to what degree the transient may injure the final relations of life; nor to what degree great love may be missed or spoiled, when accidental love has anticipated its rights, even though this happened in the full and frank belief that the accident was destiny.

No part of the art of living is more important for youth than developing in one’s self the knowledge of a predestined fellowship which permits of waiting. People curse the hazards which separate lovers. But it is less the hazards which separate than those which unite at the wrong time, that ought to be cursed. First youth seldom loses in love anything but what is unimportant; the reality shows itself—when both are free—as what cannot be lost. Those who belong to each other come together in the end; those whom chance parts, never belonged to each other. A man may fail of happiness by finding out too late what is real in himself or others; not by abstaining from action before this discovery. Therefore youth should wait before making decisive plunges into its own and others’ destinies, since great love may resemble the Japanese divinity, to pray to whom more than once is a crime, since it answers prayer only once.

But even when a young couple has the profoundest mutual sense of the permanence of their feeling, it does not follow that their love ought immediately to involve the rights and the accompanying responsibilities of a later age. For young trees break or bend under too heavy a weight of fruit, nor does the fruit attain its full value on trees that are too young. Here nature herself is the opponent of youthful marriages. Let us leave on one side the possibility of people being unwillingly bound together through the consequences of an over-hasty union, and deal only with the certainty that the young people in a profound sense continue to belong to each other. They will nevertheless as surely suffer through the possible or probable consequence of their action, the child. Their consciousness of not being able to bear this consequence will doubtless make them try to avoid it. But this is an ugly beginning to a life of love. Many consider that it also involves dangers. For those who have already given to the race their tribute of new life, or who ought never thus to give, the choice must be free between the two dangers. But for the opening of a life in common this resource may be equally unsafe and unwholesome, since the racial instinct as a whole is left unaccomplished. And thus love is robbed of a part of its spiritual meaning, and sensuousness of its natural restraint. But even if these consequences do not follow, “failure” may yet be the most fortunate occurrence in these cases—and also the most usual. How then does it appear in reality?

In most cases young people have entered into their free union because they have seen no possibility of an open marriage. They are the less able to support a child, as they themselves are supported by others, in so far as they are not keeping themselves by running into debt or by badly-paid labour. In the latter case, the child means a further hindrance to life, the more so as it must involve for the woman a diminution, perhaps a total loss, of her powers of work. It is therefore the young people’s relatives who have to help. And, when this is possible, the form it takes is that the lovers are obliged to marry and receive the help that the parents can afford. In the case of the poorer classes, this is comparatively slight, as the newly-married pair frequently stay with the parents of one of them. But in the upper classes, on the other hand, they prefer, with full reason, to form their own home, and then there ensue the inevitable cares of child and housekeeping, however simple the latter may be. But these will be a hindrance to their studies, their freedom of movement, and general development. They become cage-birds, at best fed by their parents; bound by duties during the years which should have been wholly devoted to their self-development.

Thus premature marriages, whether lawful or unlawful in form, may arrest in their growth countless excellent forces, and ruin the full possibilities of happiness in later years. It is true that the early union will have stilled a powerful longing in the young people’s being. But they soon find out that it has at the same time rendered difficult, perhaps impossible, the satisfaction of their desire of knowledge, the taste for research, the creative power, and freedom of action in other, more or less important, directions; for example, in the love of travel which is felt by all young people of spirit, and in the love of pleasure in a wholesome sense. The young mother’s beauty probably never attains the fulness designed by nature, and she is destined to grow old before her time. And even when her children are not weaklings—as is most frequently the case—they do not afford her the happiness they might have brought if they had been longed for; if she had not had to sacrifice to them her youthful joy, the fulness of her strength and beauty, but, on the contrary, had felt this enhanced through motherhood. Above all, the children do not receive the bringing-up which the mother might give them at a somewhat maturer age.

Even if a pair of lovers are themselves willing to be subject to the hindrances imposed in most cases by a premature union, this must be their own affair; but for the child there must be loss.

In order that the child may enjoy the full possibility of favourable conditions of life—in birth as well as in bringing-up—in northern Europe the age of the woman at marriage should be at least twenty, that of the man about twenty-five. This is the period of full maturity, and until this age is reached youth itself gains by complete abstinence, in order by its marriage at the proper age, in the words of Tacitus, to “let the children witness to their parents’ strength.” In the opinion of most younger men of science it is less and less probable that acquired qualities are inherited. Others, again, who have defended or still hold this view, have maintained with more or less force—as a condition of the progress of the race—that procreation should not take place until the activity and surroundings of the parents have acquired a definite character. Acute psychologists who have given attention to woman’s nature, consider that it does not attain its full spiritual maturity before about the age of thirty, while she then still possesses her youthfulness unimpaired; that until then her countenance does not acquire its true completeness of expression; that her individuality, intellectual powers, and passion are then for the first time fully awake; that only these properties can inspire deep love, and that thus woman gains everything by a later marriage, whereas the result of early marriages, where the husband has to “educate” his wife, is frequently, as a witty lady has remarked, that he is destined instead to educate a wife for someone else.