Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Nor is it only narrow-viewed preachers of morality, but men of science with the broadest outlook in these matters, who declare ever more positively that abstinence until the age of maturity is in a high degree favourable to the physico-psychical strength and elasticity of both sexes, and that such favourable effect may sometimes extend beyond this age.

To this direct gain must also be added the indirect one: that all self-control for a greater and gladdening end—and what end can be greater than this one?—gives to the will that force and to the personality that joy in its strength which will later be all-important in every other department of life.

Such an advancement of the age of marriage will probably not be opposed by many women. Young girls have learned by the experience of others, and now there is scarcely to be found a woman married before the age of twenty who has not discovered that it was premature before she reaches twenty-five. Moreover it is seldom the woman’s desire that hurries on a secret union; for, in the absence of any admixture of Southern blood, it is a long time, many years indeed in some cases, before the senses of the Northern woman are consciously awakened.

But the young girl loves and wishes to satisfy the longing from which she sees her lover suffer, the more so when she comes to know that the demonstrations of affection which have satisfied her needs have increased his suffering. And therefore she silences her own innermost consciousness, which adjures her to wait.

This silencing of the inner voice not infrequently has for its result that the two souls are never fully united, since the senses have stood in their way; or in Nietzsche’s words: Die Sinnlichkeit übereilt oft das Wachsthum der Liebe so dass die Wurzeln schwach bleiben und leicht auszureissen sind. In every pure feeling of morality, a young woman who thus surrenders herself in love stands immeasurably above the engaged girl of good family who allows the man she says she loves to toil alone during the best years of his young manhood, so as at last to prepare for her the position which her own ideas of life, or those of her family, demand. But higher than either stands the young woman who has known how to preserve the freshness of love’s springtime. And when women’s own claims of happiness have become more refined, when their insight into nature is more profound, when they thus become fit to take the lead in erotic development—which in Scandinavia during the last generation has unfortunately been in man’s hands,—then they will also understand this. They must prolong the happy time when love is unspoken, unfettered by promises, full of expectation and intuition. And they need not on this account give up the comradeship in sport, in walks, and studies, which is wholesome in itself, cheerful and preparatory to happiness, but which now leads to premature unions. Women will come to understand when they ought to be on their guard, in order that the sufferings of the period of waiting may be minimised. They will shorten the secret engagement, and they will do away with the public engagement, with the dangers both involve of attenuation of the feelings, and with the latter’s profanation of love’s privacy.

If the youth of the North does not feel its soul in harmony with this mood, its life will have lost its springtime—without receiving in exchange a longer summer; for premature warmth has its revenge in life as in nature. To experience fully the peculiar beauty of each season of life is the attribute of a profounder comprehension of life’s meaning—and this truth is not less true because a Juliet was only fourteen. What Shakespeare has revealed in her is not the force of early love, incomparable with any other power; rather does he show the love, instantaneous, fatal, overcoming all obstacles, which—equally powerful at every age—yet shows its force most unmistakably when it drives two human beings to death just at the time when the yet unlived life they have before them makes the thought of death most full of horror. Only such an exception can anticipate in springtime the flowering of summer. It is therefore not from the whole necessity of their nature, but from attaching too much importance to one side of it, that many young people now have the idea that love loses its fire and its purity by waiting until the organism can bear its fruits. Nothing is more certain than that the chastity of perfect love is conditioned towards unity by the will of the soul and the senses. But this chaste will may be found before or after the possibility of its realisation. And love’s chastity may then show itself as well in waiting for complete unity as in altogether renouncing the same.

It is true that a young man will not experience the intoxication of love at twenty-five as he experienced it some years earlier. But if he feels it for the first time at about twenty-five, then—according to all the laws of physico-psychical sensations of pleasure—just at the height of his sexual existence, and after years of self-control and labour for happiness, he ought to be able to experience a richer vital intoxication than he would have been capable of in the earlier years of his youth.

It is incontestable that premature erotic claims are less the result of the needs of the organism than of the influence of the imagination upon it. Only a new healthiness and beauty in the method of treating erotic questions will gradually refashion the now over-excited imagination, calm erotic curiosity, and strengthen the sense of responsibility towards self and towards the new generation, so that premature sexual life may lose its attraction for the young.

All this however concerns only immature youth.