Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

It is thus a physiological and psychological fact that the man or woman who for the first time has communicated to the other the joys of the senses retains a power over her or him which is never really set aside. It is even said that long after a man’s death a woman sometimes bears children to another man which resemble the first. As such influences are more decided in the case of the woman, her fidelity has also for this reason become more of a natural necessity than man’s—although the same influence, if in a somewhat less degree, applies to him.

Even if no qualms of conscience for others’ sufferings are mingled with a new happiness—in many other senses the two, who in each other seek to forget the past of one of them, will perhaps for ever find a third between them.

Marriage, in a word, has such sure allies in man’s psycho-physical conditions of life that one need not be afraid of freedom of divorce becoming equivalent to polygamy. What this freedom would abolish is only lifelong slavery.

It is evident to every thoughtful person that a real sexual morality is almost impossible without early marriage; for simply to refer the young to abstinence as the true solution of the problem is, as we have already maintained, a crime against the young and against the race, a crime which makes the primitive force of nature, the fire of life, into a destructive element.

But the consequence of early marriages must be free divorce.

As soon as one approaches the outer side of the marriage problem, one is met by the experience which the four great Norwegian writers, Ibsen, Bjōrnson, Lie, and Kielland, some years ago jointly and publicly announced: that at present the majority do not marry for love. And R. L. Stevenson may have hit the mark, when he calls the marriages of the majority “a kind of friendship sanctioned by the police” and compares the “fancy” which decides them to that which sometimes takes one for a particular fruit in a dish that is being handed round.

But even if we one day come so far that early love-matches are the rule, we shall still be faced, as regards them, by the system which at present obtains among the upper classes: that marriage is binding upon the lovers before love is consummated. There is therefore a truth worthy of consideration in the words of the brothers Margueritte, in their contribution to the question of free divorce; that as the young girl has not experienced what she binds herself to at marriage, the majority of divorces begin on the wedding night.

Free divorce is therefore an unconditional demand of such young people who know that unforeseen transformations may take place in the sphere of the soul as in that of the senses, and who now frequently seek in the secret possession of love a security against a precipitancy which the legal bond of marriage may make irretrievable.