Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Fidelity towards one’s self—also in the new sense of the word—thus involves not only the ability in case of need to destroy the bridge between one’s self and one’s past. It also implies the building of better bridges to strengthen the connection between our personality and our present. It implies not only the capacity to have finished with a destiny; but also that of not having done too soon with a person. It may certainly involve the necessity of a new experiment in life. But still more certainly it involves the need of not allowing the incidental numbness of one’s feeling to seduce one to new “experiences.” This expression—in place of the old word “adventures”—implies, moreover, an intensification of feeling: where formerly only the excitement of “adventure” was looked for, a richer element of life is now sought. But it is often a fatal error to suppose that this is to be gained in new relations, when on the contrary it might have been won by an intensification of the former ones. By more attention to and respect for the other’s personality one may often discover more than one had expected; for some people are like certain landscapes or works of art: they do not begin to make an impression until one thinks one has done with them. But piety is required to await the revelations of soul as of a work. Piety implies contemplation, and this demands peace. But peace is difficult to find in our time, whose misfortune is precisely disturbance and amusement.

That our time like every other has its particular epidemics in the erotic sphere, is certain, and disturbance is just the condition in which the most dangerous of these find a favourable soil. It is therefore a part of the erotic art of living that a married couple should now and then pass some time undisturbed in each other’s company—or separately and alone—in order thus to strengthen the health of their feelings. Here as in other things external precautions against infection are unimportant in comparison with care of the general health.

Only he who, after unceasing effort and patient self-examination, can say that he has used all his resources of goodness and understanding; put into his married life all his desire of happiness and all his vigilance; tried every possibility of enlarging the other’s nature, and yet has been unsuccessful,—only he can with an easy conscience give up his married life.

The life-tree of a human being is formed, no more than are the trees of the forest, according to a strict measure for the length of the branches or a pattern for the shape of the leaves. Like nature’s trees, its beauty depends upon the freedom of the boughs to take unexpected curves, upon the disposition of the leaves to exhibit an infinite diversity of shape. Only he who does not permit the tree to grow according to its own inner laws, but clips it according to those of gardening, can be sure of not preparing surprises for himself and others, when one branch unexpectedly shoots out and another equally unaccountably withers. No one can answer for the transformations to which life thus may subject his own nature; nor for the changes which the transformation of another’s nature may effect in his own feeling. He may possess the rarest disposition to fidelity, the most sincere desire to concentrate himself upon his love, to “let his personality grow around it, as about its core”—it nevertheless does not depend upon his will alone whether this core shall shrivel or be corrupted.

Therefore the desire of fidelity can not, must not, and ought not to imply more than the will to be true to the deepest needs of one’s own personality.

In other spheres than that of love, people admit this freely. Nobody considers it an unquestionable duty for a young man to find at once the view of life or the career in which he can continue for the rest of his life. What young people are rightly warned against is the wandering without method among different opinions or undertakings; for only that belief or that work which one seriously tries to live by and live for can really employ the powers of the personality and thus show its efficacy in enhancing them. But the most profound seriousness cannot prevent a continued development of the personality from one day compelling the man to abandon that belief or that work. It probably would not occur to a thoughtful clergyman to appeal to such a man’s promises at confirmation, or to a thoughtful father to bring forward his own choice of a career as an example to his son.

Lifelong tenacity was demanded in those days when it was assumed that a single doctrine, a single set of circumstances, was entirely adequate for personal development for a whole lifetime. The crime of deviation was then logically punished by excommunication or by fines. But the profounder view which we have acquired in the matters of belief and occupation must also be extended to the third. We ought to perceive that unconditional fidelity to one person may be just as disastrous to the personality as unconditional continuance in a faith or an employment. Those who are now patching the sack-cloth of asceticism with a few shreds from the purple mantle of personality are spoiling both. Either state the claim of renunciation clearly, like the Catholic, or admit the whole claim of personality. But the whole problem is unfairly stated by those who make “personal love” the moral basis of marriage, but go on to speak of this love as though it were a question of light-heartedly taking partners for a game, where nothing is more usual than that each woman finds the right man and each man the right woman—and so everything is in order. If life were so easy, there would be reason for the pronouncements, which are now so profoundly coarse, that only the man or woman without character, the aimless personality, is incapable of vowing a lifelong love and keeping the promise; nay, that a true personality can “command itself to love its child’s father or mother.”

He who asserts that our true personality will always follow the duty laid down by society and constantly be able to fulfil the claims of fidelity, and that those who cannot do this are guided by a false subjectivity and not by their personality, makes the idea of personality equivalent to that of member of society, the whole equivalent to the part. The personality, the unique and peculiar value, is certainly connected through part of its nature with the standards of right upheld by society. Yet it never becomes equivalent to them.

The only thing therefore that a psychological thinker can demand is that love should not divide the personality in any phase of a human being’s development, but should always be its true expression.

But only one who is ignorant of the idea of personality can believe that the relation, into which a person at the age of twenty puts his whole feeling, must necessarily correspond to the needs of the same personality as it becomes at thirty or forty. Only one so ignorant can persuade himself that the destiny of our love will necessarily resemble our lofty theory of love, our pure desire of constancy. If even our own will has little to do with the love we feel, how much less then will it influence that which we receive or lose!