Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

When, on the other hand, a pair of lovers have reached the age referred to as that of full maturity, and their complete union can only further their own life-enhancement and that of the race, then they commit a sin against themselves and the race if they do not enter into union.

But not even in such a case is secret love desirable, in which the woman goes in constant uneasiness for the possible child, and yet—after the first period of happiness—in a growing desire not only for it but for all the other conditions of life which might give sun and fresh air to her feeling, confined, as it were, in forcing-house or cellar.

In most cases it is only a question of time how soon this secret happiness will languish, since the risk is almost entirely on the woman’s side and the man is too much in the position of one who receives. For human nature is such that this makes one hard; and love is such that this makes one weak. If the man is not hardened thereby, it is because he is extremely sensitive. And again, if he is so, then the secret union, in which the woman gives most, becomes just as humiliating to the man as a marriage in which the wife keeps him by her fortune or her work. The woman, on her side, will be the more difficult to please, will make higher claims upon the love which is to compensate her for the home and for the child, the two interests through which she would first have felt her powers developed in every direction, or, in other words, would have gained complete happiness.

For a woman’s best qualities, even as a mistress, are inseparably bound up with the motherhood in her nature.

There has been and is an infinity of talk about the degradation of woman by her complete surrender without marriage; that the man thus depreciates his loved one in his own eyes and himself in hers; that he is selfish in proposing a union which injures the virtue and modesty of love; that he “sacrifices” the woman to his desire; and so on without end. All this talk is worthless, simply because a woman who loves feels herself degraded neither in her own eyes nor in those of the man; because she has no idea of a “sacrifice,” but of giving and receiving. For she desires the completeness of love with a much profounder will than man, since her erotic needs are stronger—although calmer—than his. But she is frequently—and often for a long time—unconscious that her profound desire to be made happy at any price through love nevertheless refers at bottom to the child. The man sees only the woman’s longing and his happy smile not unfrequently tells of an easy victory. But he does not know—for a long time she does not know herself—when her love becomes a sacrifice; when she begins to feel her position as a degrading one. The man does not see what her smile conceals; he does not understand her when she is silent, and perhaps he does not listen when she speaks. He thus believes her to be still satisfied, when she has begun to hunger for more.

Woman’s need of living and suffering for the race gives her love a purer glow, a higher flame, a profounder will, a more tireless fidelity than man’s. The unsatisfied longing for motherhood is released in an ever warmer, ever more self-sacrificing affection for the loved one. Man, on the other hand, who has less and less opportunity of giving, thereby comes to love less and less. When the woman discovers this, she begins to remember what she has given. And then strife, sin, sorrow, and their wages—death—have entered into what was perhaps at the beginning a genuine love; a love which might have had a full and fair life, if it had had the unifying and purifying influence of a common end, a great purpose.

When love possesses nothing of this kind, its power of motion is directed against itself. The feelings of both parties then become the object of a game like that of parfiler, which was the rage in the eighteenth century, and which consisted in drawing the threads out of worn-out cloth of gold. The feelings are torn up, ripped open, tied together; tangled, disentangled, and wound up. But feelings are roots, not threads—not even gold threads. It is in the great, wholesome realities of life that the creative force of love, like that of art, finds the productive earth for its growth. Torn out of this earth, love, as surely as art, is like a tree blown down by a spring storm, which may indeed put forth leaves this spring—though all its roots are exposed to the air—but which will not live through the summer.

Clandestine love is in this respect like an upper-class marriage without children and without common pursuits, although the self-sacrificing, self-supporting, clandestine mistress stands far above the kept wife, fashionable and full of pretension.

Thus it is not abstract ideas of duty, but real selfishness, which is one with real morality, that will teach youth to understand the meaning of Spinoza’s profound thought, made still more profound by the doctrine of evolution: that “the sexual love which has its origin in what is external and accidental, may easily be turned to hate, a kind of madness that is nourished on discord; but that love, on the other hand, is lasting, which has its cause in freedom of soul and in the will to bear and bring up children.”