Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

It is true that modern men and women are less able to bear unhappiness in marriage than were those of former times. This shows that connubial idealism makes greater demands than formerly.

The conscious will to live, of our time, revolts against the meaningless sufferings through which the people of bygone days, above all the women, allowed themselves to be degraded, benumbed, and embittered. A finer knowledge of self, a stronger consciousness of personality, now puts a limit to one’s own suffering, since the danger is understood of taking hurt in one’s soul. This determination of individualism makes it impossible for the modern woman to be fired by the ideal of Griselda—if for no other reason, because she feels how all-suffering meekness increases injustice. The “good old” marriages, sustained by the willing sacrifice of wives, are disappearing—that is happily true! But no one takes notice of the new good ones that are coming in their place. If those who now grudgingly reckon up divorces would also count all happy marriages, it would be seen that new formation has proceeded further than dissolution.

It must be evident that the question of divorce is the pursuance of the line of development of Protestantism. With the formation of a right and a left party, as usual in the treatment of a problem of culture, the Reformation succeeded only in asserting the right of the senses in human life. That it is the right of the soul in sexual life that is now most intimately affected by the question, people will not understand. Against the right of the individual they set up that of the child. If there is none, then a certain number of Christians are willing to admit that divorce is sometimes justified. Unhappy parents, on the other hand, must remain together for the sake of the children.

But the erotically noble person of the present day cannot, without the deepest sense of humiliation, belong to one he does not love, or by whom he knows he is not loved. Thus for one or both of the parties a marriage that is persisted in without the love of one or both causes profound suffering either through this humiliation or through lifelong celibacy.

This is the kernel of the question, which is avoided by all who, in their care for the children, forget that the parents must nevertheless be considered as an end in themselves. It is not asked that for the sake of the children they should commit other crimes; thus a woman who committed forgery to support her child would be disapproved of. But other women are judged leniently who “for the sake of their children” feel themselves prostituted year after year in their marriage.

That married people are to be found who continue to live as friends, since the erotic needs of both are small; that others do not feel the humiliation of cohabitation without love; that the former as well as the latter are probably acting best for the children in keeping together a home for them—this does not prevent others under similar circumstances from suffering in such a way that life loses all its value. And these are they who end either in adultery or divorce.

Even if an enemy of divorce admits these difficulties, he replies, that the individual must still suffer for his erotic as for his other mistakes, since only so can people be taught not to commit mistakes.

But the true state of the case may be, that just as in old times murders increased in proportion to the number of executions people witnessed, so unhappy marriages may become more frequent, the more there are at present; for it is, above all, the whole spirit that prevails around us which determines our action. If the young are accustomed to see their elders content with false and ugly relations, they will learn to be so likewise. If they see around them an aspiration towards ideal conditions in love—an idealism which is revealed now in a beautiful married life, now in the dissolution of one that is not beautiful—then their ideals will also be lofty. Those again, who have once made a mistake, will perhaps be more clear-sighted if they choose again.

But neither those who make mistakes nor those who witness them can be saved by the misfortunes of others from that great source of error, erotic illusion. And until erotic sympathy has become more refined, these mistakes are the most innocent of all. Every lover believes himself to be exempted from the sacrifice of illusion and no experience of the irretrievable erotic mistakes of others has ever opened the eyes of one blinded by love.

As it is recognised that society ought to make the lives of all as valuable as possible, this involves the claim that innocent mistakes should cause as little ruin as need be.