Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

And even when no feelings of affection exercise their retentive power, many people prefer to remain as wreckage on the same shore, rather than be washed away towards a new and uncertain fate.

Human nature is credited with far too great simplicity and elasticity when it is taken for granted that one experiment in life would succeed another if divorce were free. In this case it is life itself, not the law, which fixes the insurmountable limits. To the deeper natures which have broken away from a life-connection, the pain of it has often been so great as permanently to deaden the colours of life.

In connection with the modern demand for exemption from motherhood we have already rejected the expedient of securing love’s freedom through the rearing of children by the State. At the same time the importance and value of the parental home was insisted upon as strongly as possible.

Here, on the other hand, is the place to point out the one-sidedness of the notion that nothing is more important than that the parents should remain together for the sake of the children—since everything must finally depend upon how the parents remain together and what they become through remaining together.

The more degrading cohabitation is to the personality of each parent the less valuable will be the influence for the children of the parental relation.

Only one who sees in marriage a system directly ordained by God, a form of realisation of the divine reason, can maintain the proposition that in such a system the good must outweigh human defects. Those who hold that the maintenance of marriage is always the sound and moral course, must take upon themselves the burden of proving that the dull connubial habits of divided mates are a pure source for the origin of new beings; that their mutually conflicting influences are better able to further the welfare of the children than a tranquil bringing-up by one of them: that the happiness of one of them in a new union is more dangerous to the children than his unhappiness in the former one.

To those, on the other hand, who hold the faith of Life, the question of the children is always a fresh one in every fresh divorce. Here again we must rise to the conditional judgment, and leave behind the chess-board morality with its equal squares of right and wrong. The danger to the children arising from a divorce depends on all that has gone before and all that comes after. He who dissolves his marriage in the face of his inner consciousness of the harm that the children will thereby suffer, commits a sin which will infallibly be succeeded by the remorse that friends are sometimes eager to adduce as extenuating circumstances. He, on the other hand, who “sins” with an easy conscience, has made his choice with the welfare of the children in one scale of the balance. This calm of conscience is then not indifference, and, therefore, does not prevent the possibility of his suffering deeply through the consequences of the decision which he nevertheless does not regret. It may be that in most cases where there are children, the less painful course, even for him who is most convinced of his personal right, is to endeavour to the utmost to preserve a common life which allows the children to grow up under the joint protection of a father and mother, and for the sake of the children to give this life a worthy and kindly character.

In former times, people mended and patched things up endlessly. The psychologically developed generation of the present day is more disposed to allow what is broken to remain broken. For, except in the cases where the cause of rupture has been outward misunderstanding or belated development, patched-up marriages—like patched-up engagements—seldom prove lasting. It has often been profound instincts that caused the rupture; the reconciliation violated these instincts and sooner or later such violation revenges itself.

Thus, it happens, that even exceptional natures have a greater burden than they can bear, and then it is not the living together but the dying together of their parents that the children witness.

Neither religion nor the law, neither society nor the family, can decide what a marriage kills in a human being or what it may be the means of saving in him. Only he himself knows the one and feels the other. Only he himself can determine how far it may be possible for him to have so far finished with his own existence that he can completely pass into that of his children; to bear the pain of a continued married life so that it may enhance the powers of himself and the children. A mother can do this oftener than a father, but in no case is there any standard that others can use to determine when an excess of suffering is present. More than this, there is strictly no suffering, but only suffering beings who in every case create the suffering anew according to their type of soul.