Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

No thorough reshaping of emotions and customs takes place according to dogmas and programmes; this one least of all. But no other motive power exists which will finally induce all—the small and the great, the weak and the strong— to follow the line of development, except the increased freedom of choice of personal love, with a correspondingly increased certainty as regards the influence of that choice upon the welfare of the race. For unless love continued to be the condition of morality, the cause of selection, the new humanity would gradually lose advantages already gained. Neither the “breeding institute” nor “freedom of pairing” is capable of enhancing the spiritual and bodily resources of mankind in a universal, permanent, and organic way. Love alone can do this.

It is true that it has yet to be proved that love—other conditions being equal—produces the best children. But this will one day be proved.

This knowledge is for the present only intuition. But so are all truths in the beginning. Moreover, possibilities of indirect proof are not wanting even now. First and foremost this, that love has not its origin in human life, and is not a product of civilisation, but shows itself already in the animal world. Among animals it is capable of resulting in death from sorrow at the loss of a mate, as also in other emotional phenomena of human life. It may even lead to monogamy, although with animals as with human beings monogamy is neither a necessary result of love nor an indispensable condition of development. For many of the higher species of animals are polygamous, while others, below them in the scale, are monogamous. If love did not involve any great advantage, it might doubtless have arisen, but would not have persisted, in the face of the hindrances which its personal selection appears to put in the way of the maintenance of the race. Mankind has thus already brought the emotion of love from its primitive animal stem and grafted it upon the tree of civilisation. It has gradually been ennobled and exalted into one of the highest powers of human life. And how would this growing importance of love be possible, if it enhanced only the happiness of the individual, and not also the life of the race?

The evolution of human love has shown itself partly in an increasingly definite individualisation in selection, partly in a more complete admission and enhancement of individual qualities.

In other words: personal characteristics have tended more and more to inspire love, and love has more and more developed personal characteristics. This again—as already admitted—has resulted in more and more individuals failing to perform their duty to the race, either because their feeling, although reciprocated, could not lead to marriage, or because the feeling in some respect or other has been disappointed. This passionate selection of a single one among the many by whom—from an objective point of view—the duty to the race might equally well have been performed, has thus in a sense become anti-social.

But such lives, wasted as they are from the immediate point of view of the ennobling of the race, have yet been able to serve the same end indirectly. Many of these persons, childless in an ordinary sense, have left immortal offspring. Others have shed upon the battle-field, in winning victories for humanity, the blood which they never saw flowing in the fine network of veins on a child’s temples. By the greatness of their own ideals they have enlarged the hearts of their fellow-men; and their courage has not had to sink before the possibility of their own failure to realise their ideals being cast in their teeth. They have bought their prophetic power at the highest possible price: that of never having had a happiness to lose; and they bear without bitterness the poverty which has made them richer in faith.

That many lives—and worthy lives—are wasted through love is only one manifestation of life’s impenetrable tendency to universal prodigality. It is one with the great necessity, whose hand smites and wounds us so long as we curse it, but caresses and supports as soon as we bless it.

We must not look at the victims—even if we ourselves are among them—if we would see the meaning of life in life itself. We must fix our eyes upwards. And then it is certain—since love continually and in spite of all is extending its power—that individual love, with all its victims and all its mistakes, nevertheless in the long run assists the elevation of the race.

The great Western prophet of pessimism argued that love was nothing but a task imposed in this fashion upon the individual by der Genius der Gattung; that only contradictions attract one another and that the offspring inherits the complementary qualities that each has sought in the other. These contradictions—through the hostility of which the parents afterwards make each other unhappy—coalesce and neutralise each other in the child, so that the latter, at the expense of its parents, becomes a well-equipped, rich, or harmonious personality. Carried to an extreme, this saying of Schopenhauer’s, like many other such pregnant thoughts, becomes an absurdity. But every one who has observed love must have found—long before he knows, or without ever knowing, that this experience is exalted into pessimism—that all powerful love arises between opposed natures. The harmony that results from similarity is monotonous, poor, and moreover dangerous to the development of the individual, as well as that of the race. But what is contrary is certainly not always conflicting, although it may prove so if the contrariness extends to views of life and its purpose, its value and conduct. Conflicting natures are—in spite of Schopenhauer—not unfrequently equally unfavourable for the child’s disposition and for its bringing-up, and the will of the race often fails of its purpose through their very compulsion to unite in a love which is soon turned to hatred. Again, contrary natures often become conflicting, owing to their turning the wrong side of their qualities to each other after marriage, while in the early period of love they had shown each other the right side of these qualities. That such a marriage is unhappy is no evidence against love’s selection, but a great one for mankind’s lack of culture for marriage. That every sympathetic dissimilarity between persons has a limit, the overstepping of which leads further and further towards antipathetic dissimilarities, is a psychological lesson which is deeply inculcated by marriage.