Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

In marriage as in other fields, the modern principle must be put in force, that punishment should improve the faulty and prepare the way for a higher idea of justice. But this higher idea is that marriage should be contracted under gradually improving conditions, not that it should continue under gradually deteriorating influences.

Marriage under constraint forces people to continue their cohabitation and to bring children into the world in a revolt of the soul which must leave its mark in their children’s nature and thus influence their future destiny. But this is not a “well-deserved punishment” for a mistake: it is the profoundest violation of the sanctity of the personality and of the race.

Here as ever the only logical alternative is full individual liberty or unconditional surrender.

The Catholic Church maintains—and rightly from its own point of view—that, since even marriages entered into with the warmest love and under the most favourable conditions may turn out unhappily, it is impossible to base the morality of marriage on the emotion of love. Nothing that is founded upon emotion can be permanent. Nay, the richer, the more individually and universally developed a personality is, the less immutable will be the state of its soul. Thus even the highest need an inflexible law, an irremovable tie, to prevent their being at the mercy of winds and waves through their emotions, while inferior beings need them so as not to be driven out of their course by their desires. The concessions of Protestantism, therefore, lead to the dissolution of marriage, since when love is made the basis of marriage it is built upon sand.

Marriage, which the Church therefore made a sacrament and indissoluble, had already become the legal expression of the husband’s right of private ownership over his wife and children. The course of development has consisted in an unceasing transformation of this religio-economical view, and development cannot stop until the last remnant of this conception has been destroyed.

Therefore the believers in Life refuse to admit either the half-admissions of Protestantism or the logical compulsion of Catholicism. They demand that the step from authority to freedom shall be taken outright, since they know that the external authority which simplifies life does not create the deeper morality. Compulsion fetters legal freedom of action, but thereby only makes secret crime a social institution.

And even if a husband or a wife has outwardly overcome a temptation, this will not prevent that individual when in the embrace of the lawful spouse from being filled with feeling for another. Have they then avoided adultery? Not according to their own finest consciousness—that consciousness which Goethe aroused in his great poem on elective affinities. Duties performed may as surely as those left undone produce incalculable and tragic results. They are foolish who think they can lead another soul across the bridge, fine as a hair and sharp as a knife-edge, by which every one goes his solitary way over the abyss to salvation: the way of the choice of personal conscience.

When custom and law deprive a human being of full freedom of choice in the matters of most profound personal concern—his belief, his work, and his love—then existence is robbed of greater values than those the compulsory fulfilment of duty can bring in.

In love, the idea of personality has now brought us to the view that “property is theft”; that only free gifts are of value; that the ideas of connubial “rights” and “duties” are to be exchanged for the great reconstructive thought, that fidelity can never be promised, but that indeed it may be won every day.