Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Even in homes where there is most affection, the children, in their stormy period of springtime, are as riddles which their parents often try in vain to solve. A young soul never suffers so much as during the solution of its own riddle. But only such a father or mother as has succeeded in becoming renewed and rejuvenated through his or her children will be able to help them in the solution. Otherwise the result will only be that the parents on their side will bring stones to the wall which the children on theirs are building ever higher.

Even parents who have not grown into crabbed working-machines; who do not use their authority because they have the means of power, but only because they possess spiritual superiority; who in their home let their children have not only freedom for gladness but also the joy of freedom, will nevertheless many a time fall short in the endeavour to render their superiority serviceable to the children, or by their broad-mindedness to liberate them from the one-sidedness of youth. And in that case they must give up the struggle; for it will not improve the difficulties of the present, but only destroy future chances of understanding.

In the three greatest decisions to be taken in life—those of the fundamental view of life, of one’s life work, and of love—each soul must be its own counsel. In these matters, parents must restrict their authority to saving their children from vital dangers; but they must also be able to discover such dangers, and to differentiate profound from superficial needs, the high-road from the by-road. If their parents are not capable of this, then the children must perform their duty to themselves and to life, by—sooner or later—going their own way.

If, like a young couple in a similar case, the children can “smile and be silent,” while showing their seriousness in their actions, then they will probably be capable of educating their parents. In that case, it will frequently be apparent that the heart of a father or mother was stronger, their soul greater than either child or parents had believed before the test was made. If, on the other hand, it should prove that the faults and prejudices of the parents were the sole cause of the conflict, then these faults and prejudices are not entitled to any more respect because they are those of a father or mother.

But even if it should be the case that the parents have no souls capable of profound feeling, but only hearts which can bleed—it is nevertheless the duty of the child towards itself, and towards past and future generations, to give to its own nature the highest possible perfection through love. Parents are only a link in the infinite chain of the race: it is the blood of hundreds of thousands that the parents have transmitted to their children, who now in their turn are to pass it on. Children have higher duties towards all these dead and unborn beings than they have towards the single couple who became their father and mother. It behooves the young to let all these dead ones live again as fully as possible through the development of their own being and in the blood of their children. A human being may owe a greater debt of gratitude for his own nature to his grandmother’s heart or to his grandfather’s imagination than to his own narrow-hearted mother or unintelligent father. So far is it from being an invariable duty to bring joy to the parents, that it may be one’s duty to bring them sorrow—in order to bring joy to one’s successors. It is a good thing to honour one’s father and mother; but the commandment which Moses forgot is more important still: to honour one’s son and daughter even before they are born.

When the sense of the dead and of the unborn becomes a conscious motive of human action, through being a force in human emotion, then the claim of the parents to decide their children’s life—as well as the claim of the latter to decide that of their parents—will gradually fall to pieces before the majesty of the past and of the future.

It results from the foregoing that any doctrine of morality is of little worth which does not involve the need of providing the means of marriage for healthy persons between the ages of twenty and thirty; a possibility which was possessed without exception by the Germanic ancestors whose example of abstinence is now appealed to.

So long as increasingly difficult examinations, the scale of pay in government departments, the division of profits in business, and the general rate of living, stand in the way of young people’s chances of marriage, things will remain as they are, in spite of an increasing minority of men who, for their own personality’s sake or for that of their love, maintain abstinence until marriage or remain celibate.

The abolition of this sacrifice to the state of society and civilisation is a matter of sufficient importance to the individual, but of infinitely greater importance to society, whose forces are now being wasted by the effects of immorality and checked by those of morality: society, whose strength depends to such a great degree upon young and healthy parents for the new generation.

Even under actual conditions, the chances of marriage for young people might be increased by a judicious realisation of the “own home” idea in country districts; by a shortening of the university course; by the raising of salaries in the lower ratings (they appear at present to be calculated upon the satisfaction of sexual needs through prostitution); by the granting of pensions at an earlier age, so that the higher rates of pay may be reached in middle age—when the burden of educating children is heaviest;—and by increased exemption from taxation for men and women who have to provide for a family.