Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

The young know, if any can know, that no form of love is more beautiful than that in which two young people find each other so early that they do not even know when their feeling was born, and accompany each other through all their fortunes, sometimes even to death—for now and then life vouchsafes this crowning fortune. Never do greater possibilities exist for the happiness both of the individuals and of the race than in a love which begins so early that the two can grow together in a common development; when they possess all the memories of youth as well as all the aims of the future in common; when the shadow of a third has never fallen across the path of either; when their children in turn dream of the great love they have seen radiating from their parents.

These happy ones—like the old couple in Bernard’s fine fresco in the mairie of the Louvre arrondissement in Paris—will one day look up to the stars of the winter twilight, united in a more intimate devotion than either the playtime of the spring morning or the midday toil could afford.

If this wonderful love were really the first and only one which fell to the lot of every young man and woman, and were it always possible for them to realise it at the right time—then there would neither be a problem of morality nor of divorce.

But the youth of the present day knows that this love is not the fortune of all. It has learned so much, from literature, from life, from its own soul, of the transformations of love, that one is tempted to wish for these young people the romantic belief of their fathers and mothers in a love which became extinct as easily as now. The difference is merely this, that whereas formerly they were content with a faded glow, we will have continual fire.

It is known now that, although youthful love may be the surest basis of marriage, it is more often the reverse. Here, if anywhere, is the scene of accidents. The one we have grown up with, the girl or youth we are thrown with just when the erotic life is waking; the one we were teased about; the one we hear is “in love” with us; the one we meet when the happiness of others fills the air with longing—these and other accidents, but not personal choice, often decide youthful love.

Then the imagination sets to work to transform the reality in accordance with the ideal we have formed for ourselves—and even this is often the result of accidental influence. It is therefore not surprising that most people, when after ten years or so they meet again the object of their first love, give a sigh of gratitude to the fate which made that love “unhappy.”

When it has not been so in the usual sense of the word, one of the parties may often be most to be pitied, and it is just those young people who unhesitatingly realise their love in the belief of its lifelong continuance, that in coercive marriage are made the victims of their own pure will, their healthy courage, their bright idealism.

For the younger, in the richest sense of the word, a person is, the more certainly does he possess the poet’s gift which transforms reality according to his dreams. The fine curve of a pair of lips renews the marvel of the legend: that every frog that jumps over them is changed into a rose. Even if a dim suspicion awakes, when every serious thought or intimate feeling is met by empty silence or equally empty loquacity, the imagination easily convinces the instinct that silence means “profundity of intelligence,” or speech “candour.” At every age, but especially at this, love is a great superstition. Secure as sleep-walkers in the presence of danger, its votaries fling themselves into a decision. And it is this simple rashness of innocence that the current conception of morality subjects to a lifelong punishment. The cautious ones, on the other hand, often find in time the great rewards—thanks to their own smaller value.

More things happen in a human life than marriage and finally death. Much may happen in a human soul between marriage and death. The current assumption that everything which separates a person from the partner in matrimony is evil and ought to be overcome; everything which binds him to her good and ought to be encouraged—this is part of the wisdom which reduces life to the simplest terms, which is cheap and therefore most in use; for a higher wisdom demands a higher price.