Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

But, of course, each one can know only what he has suffered from a series of events, not what he might have suffered if circumstances had been different; and thus the children’s opinion cannot in either case be regarded as decisive, when laying down the principle.

The experience, therefore, which we have, of the position of children whom death has deprived of their father is more important. While the widower, as a rule, marries again, if his children are small, the widow, in most cases, remains unmarried. And it may be regarded as certain that statistics of able men would give a remarkable result in respect of the sons of widows.

A divorce often puts the child in a corresponding position of tenderness and responsibility towards his mother. But while society bows to the “stern necessity” of a single battle making more children fatherless than the divorces of a generation—and calmly relies on the mothers’ ability by themselves to make good citizens of their sons—it shrinks from the same stern necessity when it is a question of saving a living person from lifelong unhappiness.

The children’s chief danger in a divorce is that they are often divided between father and mother and thus lose in part the companionship of brothers and sisters which is so eminently productive of happiness. Next to this, the greatest misfortune is not that the father and mother no longer live under the same roof, but that they are no longer able to meet. This misfortune could often be avoided, if friends and relations would refrain from the pleasure of deciding how the divorced couple ought to hate and variously torment each other. If people saw the merit of two human beings—who were able to separate as friends and to meet again as such—being also capable of this; if the presence of either parent with the children never led to their being influenced to the detriment of the absent one—then children, even after a divorce, would not feel the want of their essential relation to both their parents. Now, on the other hand, divided as they often are between two mutually hostile parents, separated thus from each other and—lacking common memories and other ties to bind them—gradually becoming strangers to each other when they meet, the children lose so much by a divorce, that parents in most cases can gain nothing which makes up for the losses of the children and thus prefer to bear the burdens of living together rather than lay those of divorce upon the children.

In the question of divorce also, the great fundamental idea of protestantism must be applied in the recognition of the individual’s full freedom of choice, since no case can be decided generally, and since here also the right and wrong can only be discovered through the searching of each individual conscience.

A child has often—in moments of great crisis—blocked the way which led from the door of the home. But the home within that door did not for that reason become brighter or warmer for the child.

In the preceding, the position of the children in divorce has been considered from the point of view of discord between the parents. If, on the other hand, the divorce is brought about by a new feeling on the part of one of them, then this father or mother must be prepared one day—when the children can understand them—to justify the step by showing them how the new love has made him or her a richer and greater personality. The children have a full right not to be sacrificed to the degradation of their parents. In every case, the children are the most incorruptible judges of their parents.

But the fact that a person has already brought children into the world does not give to these children an unconditional right to demand that a father or mother shall sacrifice the love that may advance themselves, and through them the race, to which they may thus give more excellent children or more excellent works than they have been able to produce hitherto. Many a woman has borne children to her husband without having seen her child; many a man has given the community his industry but never his work—until great love accomplished their innermost longing and the child or the work that was thus created became the only one indispensable to the race.

The claim of society that a father or mother, radiant with possibilities of happiness, shall sacrifice these for the sake of the children, will be reduced when the sense of the value of life has grown and the duty of parents to live for their children is more often interpreted to mean that they must continue to be fully alive, with powers of renewal. On the other hand, this very rejuvenation of parents at the present day may often result in their living so rich a life together with their children that they will need no other renewal than that which is most productive of happiness to all parties; namely, to enjoy their “second springtime” in the children’s first.