Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

The more, however, the art of living is developed, the more will human beings be able to minimise their own loss of happiness through this selection of love to the advantage of the race; for married people will come more and more to delight in and preserve each other’s differences; to restrain the antipathetic contradictions in themselves; to make more conscious use of the sympathetic dissimilarities in the other for the completion of their own one-sidedness; to cease from the endeavour, so hostile to happiness, of reforming the other according to their own nature. Even now, moreover, the need of sympathy in love is so awakened, so sensitive, that the blind passion aroused by external contradictions is less and less able to overmaster it. The need of sympathy is now quickly warned when it encounters the irreconcilable contradictions which show that each is on a different plane of existence; that each belongs to a different psychological period or continent or race. This perception even now checks the development of love in many cases, where the contradiction really is a conflicting incompatibility, and not the elective affinity determined by nature into which enter both primary dissimilarities and secondary similarities. The latter results in the lovers’ contradictions forming a rich harmony, both in their own life together and in the personalities of their children. When this attraction of contradictions has once missed its mark, one still often sees that it is one and the same type that a person will love a second or third time, or even oftener, with a persistence of selection which makes it true in a way that the object of love has all the time been the same woman or man.

The relentless force of nature’s uniting will shows itself not only in the way love brings together contradictions in marriage, but also in the rupture of marriage. A good wife, married to a good husband, loving and loved, is thus seized by a passion, incomprehensible to herself, for another man. Without reflection she gives herself up to her passion, to return again to the husband she has not ceased to love, but who never inspired in her the overmastering emotion whose purpose—according to the will of nature and of the woman herself—ought to have been a child. The same will of nature manifests itself in a number of phenomena, incomprehensible to others. An intellectual man or woman is seized by a passion for a person far inferior. How often has not a “good-looking fellow” vanquished the most high-souled man in the affections of such a woman; how often have not thoughtless beauty and empty gaiety won from a superior man what the personality of an exceptional woman could not secure! The whole secret was nature’s will to counterbalance cerebral and nervous genius by healthy, sensuous strength, to the advantage of the race. As sexual love has its origin in the fact that the sexual characters, which biologically are favourable to the race, are the most attractive, this general attraction constantly operates side by side with the individual; and it operates most strongly precisely in that kind of love which is rightly called “blind passion,” the kind which thus brings together to their misfortune conflicting contradictions.

But there is no reason to doubt that love’s selection in this case will be able to retain its instinctive sureness, although love is continually widening its instincts of psychical sympathy also. The consequence of this is that the number of contradictions which may attract will become less, but on the other hand the fewer possibilities will be more finely adapted; that the selection among contradictions will thus become more and more difficult but at the same time more and more valuable. Love’s selection now not infrequently has for its result that, of two contradictions, irresistibly united by the affinity of souls, one or both does not offer the best physical conditions for children. But to make up for this the selection may turn out excellently for the enhancement of a particular disposition, the formation of a harmonious temperament, or the fostering of a great spiritual quality. It is not only by avoirdupois and yard-measure that the advance of the race must be tested.

Such a race-enhancing selection may, for example, take place through the tendency of young women of the present day to feel or retain love less and less for a man who is erotically divided, while, on the other hand, the men who have preserved unity in their love have more and more prospect of being attractive to women. Thus, generation after generation, erotic unity may become more and more natural with men, as in the same way it has become so with women. Man’s desire for woman’s purity has determined his choice, and this choice has then through heredity further advanced the feelings of the next generation, until these have become the strongest in his erotic instincts. The clearest consciousness of the injustice of the different moral demands on man and woman; the most “liberal” view of woman’s right to the same freedom as man, are in this case unable to vanquish his instincts. When a man learns that the woman he loves has given herself to another before him, or that he shares her with another, his feeling often becomes diseased at its root: the will of sole possession that has grown up in him through the love-selection of thousands of years, and has now been further heightened by the desire for unity of individual love.

These indications may be enough to show the superficiality of the conclusions about love’s selection which are confined exclusively to physical improvement, although naturally this also is of great value. But that a pair of lovers can have a feeble-bodied child ought in itself to be no more used as evidence against love’s selection than would be the physically excellent children of an unhappy couple.

Even if the erotic attraction of dissimilarities is thus the strongest proof of the probability of love’s influence from the point of view of the enhancement of the race, it is nevertheless far from being the only one. Another is the astonishing excess of first-born or only children among distinguished personalities in different departments. A third is the proverbial ability of so-called “love-children.” A fourth, the result, often favourable to the disposition of the children, of marriages between people of different nationalities. In the first two cases we may suppose that the parents’ happiness in love—or at least their sensual passion—was at the height of its freshness and strength at the conception of the child. In the case of “love-children” it is not unfrequently a healthy woman of the people who with genuine devotion encounters the sensual desire of a man intellectually her superior. In the last case, again, it is usually a powerful love which has conquered the obstructions raised by patriotism and traditions against the attraction by means of which the national contradictions are to be blended in the child into a happy unity.

Observation in this connection is misled by innumerable side influences, counteractions, and contradictions as yet unsolved. So long as any wreck of humanity is allowed by “the right of love” to reproduce the species, the lines of conclusion in this subject will continue to intersect one another in all directions. Not until cases arise where the conditions are comparable in every other respect, shall we begin to approach an objective demonstration in the question of children’s decreasing physico-psychical vitality when they are born in unwillingness or indifference, and, on the other hand, of their increasing vitality when they are born in love. And it is not in the tender years of childhood, but when they have lived their life, that the question can first be finally answered.

That the development of children’s inherited dispositions, their childhood’s happiness, and the future tenor of their life are determined to a great extent by their being brought up in a home bright with happiness, by parents who co-operate in sympathetic understanding, this need not be dwelt upon. Everyone knows how children from such homes have received the gift of a faith in life and a feeling of security, a courage and a joy in life which no subsequent sufferings can wholly destroy. They have laid up enough warmth of sunshine to prevent their being frozen through even in the most severe winter. Those, on the other hand, who began with winter, sometimes freeze even under the summer sun.

It is no more true with regard to love’s selection than in any other respect that passion is opposed to duty otherwise than in the intermediary stage of development. In the state of innocence there is no division, since no other duty exists but blindly to follow instinct. When development is completed and “the second innocence” attained, duty will be abolished, since it will have become one with instinct.

It will then be seen that they were wrong who now think that—while God walked in Paradise and founded marriage—the devil went about in the wilderness and instituted love. Dualism will be vanquished by monism when the circular course of development has brought the starting-point near to the goal; when the natural instinct of the race meets the will to ennoble the race, born of culture; when the golden ring from either side encircles the gem with the sacred sign of life: the child. But the treasure which is now regarded as the most precious, monogamy, is perhaps destined not to be encircled by the golden ring until after many new spiral turns. It will be so when love’s selection has finally made every man and woman well fitted to reproduce the race. Not till then can the desired ideal—one man for one woman, one woman for one man—universally include the best vital conditions, for the individual and for the race. And when we have come so far, the will of erotic choice may also be so delicately and firmly entwined with every fibre of the personality’s physico-psychical material, that a man will only be able to find, win, and keep a single woman, a woman a single man. Then it may be that many human beings will experience through love’s selection what is even now the fortune of a few: the highest enhancement of their individual personality, their highest form of life as members of the race, and their highest perception of eternal life.