Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Only one thing is certain: that no one is more outside the question than the very one who causes the suffering. Thus nothing can be more unreasonable than to leave to the judgment of one of the parties the decision we have just mentioned. The knowledge of being able to refuse a divorce now involves want of consideration for the other’s moods of dejection, which would never occur if consideration were necessary to prevent separation. Such attentions are especially significant at the beginning of married life, when most young married people solve the small and great problems of accommodation with more or less difficulty. The birth of the first child, moreover, is often accompanied by abnormal states of feeling, which lead to hasty conclusions as to incompatibility and antipathy. The opponents of free divorce think that it is just during these years that precipitate divorces might take place. But they do not reflect that either partner in his sense of proprietorship now gives himself a loose rein in a way that would be unthinkable if such security did not exist. Thus the young certainly keep together, but not unfrequently destroy their finest chances of happiness. The need of mutual caution during these dissensions should have a much deeper influence in keeping a couple together than has at present the knowledge that they cannot be free. After the advent of children, the danger is small—except in the case of heartless natures—that a sufferer will too hastily think his powers of endurance are exhausted. The inter-dependence which children create between their parents when these together care for and love them, is sometimes indissoluble. In most cases it is so strong as to form the real tie, without which laws twice as strict as the present ones would have no power to keep together two unwilling beings.

When speaking of love’s selection, we pointed to the signs which indicate that the feeling for the race—the feeling which from time immemorial has linked together man and woman at a common hearth, has raised the altar near it and round them both the town wall—is approaching its renaissance. Consciousness of the children’s rights is indubitably on the increase, together with a knowledge of the rights of love. And against the assaults of this most turbulent and dangerous sea the race-feeling will continue to stand as a wall protecting society, though in a new form to give it new powers of resistance.

But the opponents of divorce think, on the contrary, that the sense of happiness through the children—especially in the case of the father—has now become so weak that most fathers would free themselves from all responsibility if they only could.

If this be so, society itself is to blame. It not only countenances sexual relations entirely independent of the mission of the race; it frees the man from responsibility for his illegitimate children and thus assigns to him a standpoint below that of the beasts. The instincts favourable to offspring, which in animals have remained undisturbed, cannot attain their full strength until man is completely answerable for every life he creates. As soon as society decrees that the fact of two persons becoming parents makes their union obligatory, the relationship itself will gradually intensify their feeling and the man will wish to possess and preserve the elements of joy for which he must always bear the burdens. Even if man’s fatherly feelings should be slow in awaking—and if a number of fathers of the present day should thus really avail themselves of free divorce to leave wife and child—there are still the mothers, who do not, as a rule, lightly leave their children, but who, on the contrary, now suffer the deepest misfortunes and renounce the greatest happiness so as to remain with them, and who—even if they tear themselves from them—are hardly ever able to release themselves. When the law gives to every mother the rights which now only the unmarried mother possesses, but imposes at the same time on every father the obligations which now only the married have—then it may be that the child will become a new and more valuable possession in the eyes of the man. If he only feels the influence he may obtain through his wife’s respect for his fatherly qualities; if his importance in the child’s existence comes to depend on personal force, not on legal might, then the quality of fatherhood may be in a high degree ennobled. And with this affection will grow, according to the immutable law, that the more man gives, the more he loves.

If matriarchy, in a new form, refined by the whole of development, should become the final phase—as in the opinion of many it has been the starting-point—of the family, then this would involve that paternal authority became conditional, depending on the value and warmth of the paternal feeling. At present many fathers are merely an accident in their children’s life, an accident which never even looks “like an idea.” And this is not only true of those fathers who, with the support of the law, withdraw themselves from all responsibility, but also of many others, especially of those who are driven by work or public business and who remain inwardly strangers to their children.

For the present, it may be regarded as certain that free divorce would, above all, afford this advantage, that a number of wives, who now keep broken-down husbands, could work for food for their children instead of for liquor for the children’s father; and that a number of mothers, who now are obliged for the sake of their children to suffer the deepest humiliation, would be able to free themselves; and in both cases the children would gain. On the other hand, the father who took advantage of free divorce to desert his family for frivolous reasons might, as a rule, be easily spared by that family.

In most cases, the children are even better off through a divorce, when the cause of it is differences of temperament and opinion between the parents. Each of them separately may be a person of merit. When they separate on the ground of dissension, both have a sense of something to atone for with the children. This prompts them to try to make amends, and thus the children receive—from each separately—far more than they did when the parents were united, when the children were witnesses to their conflicts and saw the worse side of the nature of each. The children are spared the pain of being the subject of their father’s and mother’s quarrels; of being compelled to take the part of one of them; of being torn between two diverse wills, between the jealous endeavours of each to win them exclusively. They, in part, avoid being brought up from two different, mutually-counteracting points of view, where one is trying to take away from the children the ideas that the other has given them.

But of all this the opponents of divorce take no account. The main thing is that the parents shall keep together, however chill or dark with thunder may be the air in which the children grow up.

This point of view misses the reality as much as that of those who call for divorce as soon as love is over. Keeping together may, in certain cases, give the children a happier and richer childhood than the state of things after a divorce. It has been maintained with reason that discord between the parents is sometimes compensated for by the value of the manly nature of the one and the womanly nature of the other, which—even if they do not co-operate—still work well side by side; and that children who, through dissensions at home, have early been forced to think and choose for themselves, often become stronger characters than those who have grown up in happy homes.

While, on the one hand, we hear children whose parents have separated complain that they did not have the patience to remain together, on the other we hear those who have grown up in unhappy homes regret the continuance of their parents’ married life. If this had been dissolved, the children might have had at least one good home, perhaps two, whereas now they have none.