Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

We may answer that abuses do not prove anything against the value of any particular social arrangement, so long as its right use serves well the purpose for which it was introduced.

The majority thinks that this is still the case with marriage. The minority, on the other hand, considers that its constraint now tends to defeat its original object, an enhanced sexual morality.

This minority thinks that, as soon as love is admitted as the moral ground of marriage, it will be a necessary consequence that he who has ceased to love should be allowed a moral as well as a legal right to withdraw from his marriage, if he chooses to avail himself of this right.

And this same minority is aware that love may cease, independently of a person’s will; that therefore no one can be held to the terms of a promise, the performance of which lies outside his powers.

Nothing is more natural than that love’s longing for eternity should prompt lovers to vows of eternal fidelity; nothing is more true than that it is a satanic device of society to seize upon this promise and base thereon a legal institution (Carpenter). Nothing is more necessary than to abolish the legal claims that people have on one another, supported by promises of love and vows of fidelity.

The more people understand the laws of their own being, the more will the conscientious begin to hesitate about making promises which perhaps some day they will be forced by inner necessity to break. An increasing number of people find it impossible to contract marriage, or to ask it of the other party—or to continue in marriage or ask its continuance of the other—when their love has died or has awakened for another. A generation ago, an engaged person could refuse his or her betrothed’s petition for liberation with the answer that he or she had love enough for both. In corresponding circles at the present day, such a speech is unthinkable. But then a public engagement was still regarded as a binding tie and the marriage took place. After a long engagement it was a “point of honour” for the man not to let a woman run the risk of being unmarried, and she was satisfied if he only paid his debt of honour.

Such coarseness of feeling is fortunately becoming more and more rare, although it is far from disappearing. People see more and more that they have no more right to marry simply to fulfil a duty of fidelity than they have to steal in order to fulfil a duty of maintenance; that there is no more obligation to abide by a marriage which one feels to be one’s ruin than there is a duty to commit suicide for the sake of another.

The love of older times was above all afraid that the other party should not feel sufficiently bound. The finest erotic feeling of the present day shudders at the idea of becoming a bond; trembles at pity and recoils from the possibility of becoming a hindrance. This state of the soul knows of no other right than that of perfect candour. To place legal limits to each other’s liberty, so that neither shall cause pain to the other, is under these conditions meaningless; for each suffers just as much through a union maintained without full reciprocity.

Thus the question of divorce presents itself to modern souls, in cases where there are no children. And when there are children—as is of course the rule—they think that the mistakes of parents do not absolve them from the duty of co-operating in the rearing of the children to whom they have given life.

But they maintain that this need not always be effected by means of continued cohabitation. On the other hand, this may often be necessary, and in such cases they subordinate their personal claims of happiness to those of the race. One who holds these opinions regards him who gives the same answer in every case—whether this answer be “freedom at any price” or “renunciation at any price”—simply as a moral automaton.