Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Jealousy like other shadows belongs to the rising and setting light and disappears like them in the full clearness of noonday. But its tone of feeling has become quite different since man has discovered that, if the sun stands still in the zenith for him, it is a miracle—not a right. The most highly developed people of the present day say “I am loved” or “I am not loved” with the same simplicity as they say the sun shines or does not shine. The difference is in both cases immeasurable, but in one case as in the other, necessity removes the feeling of humiliation. The grief which comes when a lover no longer feels that he brings joy to the beloved or when he sees another bring it, is natural and worthy of respect. It ceases to be so when it manifests itself in the will of an avaricious proprietor, the brutal instinct which often survives not only the feeling of the other but also its own.

But although the psychological differentiation in our time involves greater possibilities of finding some one who will satisfy some side of the erotic longing,—while it is more and more difficult to find one who wholly satisfies this ever more complex desire,—the danger of such division of self is counterbalanced by the growing wish for the longing to be wholly satisfied. Love by thus making ever greater demands becomes at the same time ever more faithful.

Those who dread the dissolution of society through the insistence upon the rights of love, do not reflect that its right to break up marriage is allowed to the feeling, which has not only the red glow of passion, but also the clearness through which two people have become conscious of each other as a revelation of the whole unsuspected richness of life. A revelation which included all the fulness of comprehension, all the serenity of confidence; where both have given with equal exactingness and generosity—not meagrely or hesitatingly, but so that each without reserve has rushed to meet the other—this is the only happiness that love’s noblemen will now experience. It will be more and more difficult even to experience it once—how much more so then to find it many times!

A great love is never like the erotic thunderstorms which move against the wind—that is to say, against the whole disposition of the personality in other things.

All valuable feelings—whether entertained for a person, a belief, a place, or a country—are conservative. The consciousness of this gives the preacher of liberty his boldness. He never perceives how liberty may be abused, since he knows what it costs to loosen a heart from what it has once embraced.

To a volatile nature, the happiness that a more steadfast one experiences in love is as unfathomable as the bliss of the mystic becoming absorbed into the fulness of his divinity is to the polytheist.

Here, as everywhere, to the believer in Life, happiness is one with morality. Since happiness consists in the greatest emotions, its first condition is to intensify and enlarge all feelings, and above all that which leads to marriage.

But in addition, the whole standard of personality depends to a great extent upon whether we consider fidelity a life-value. He who desires fidelity centres his moods and his powers upon what is essential and protects them from the gusts of the accidental. Only this gives style and greatness to existence. The desire of fidelity is therefore one with a person’s feeling for his own integrity, his inward consistency, the attitude and dignity of his spiritual being.

When fidelity is preserved for these profound reasons, it will also be broken only for the same reasons. A fidelity, on the other hand, which rests upon conventional notions of duty, will be in the fire like a fire-escape of straw.

It is moreover forgotten, in all discussions of the dangers of free divorce, that under the influence of love the whole disposition of the soul is towards fidelity. Great love absorbs all associations of ideas and thus without conscious exertion intensifies and enlarges the personality. Fidelity will be a necessary condition of love, but a condition whose psychological continuance is not favoured by coercive marriage.