Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Real life has certainly its claims: in the one case, that all who are hungry for food should have work, at such a rate of pay that they can eat; in the other, that all who are of marriageable age should have the possibility of contracting marriage at the right time. But the changes that must take place before this can come to pass will fail to appear so long as society—under the assumption that prostitution is a necessary evil—superintends its results and thus gives itself the illusion that its dangers can be provided against. For thus society escapes the search for expedients which would better provide for the two fundamental needs—love and hunger—for the satisfaction of which prostitution at present provides the only means for many men and women.

But these changes will also fail to appear so long as society—under the assumption that marriage is a necessary good—retains this as the sole mark of morality in sexual relations.

For this state of things, those preachers of morality are to blame who persuade themselves that the only cure for the evil is a still stricter maintenance of the claims of monogamy. They are afraid of any mention of the wealth of varied experience, of the longing for happiness, or the joy of life. They proclaim nothing but the sense of duty, responsibility for one’s individual soul, and obligations to society. But this has been constantly preached from the dawn of Christianity, and yet the standard of sexual morality as a whole is no higher than it was. This gives food for reflection. The more so when this dread of love is carried as far as Tolstoy’s—or rather, the Oriental world’s—detestation of the senses; when marriage is regarded solely as a palliative for a hereditary disease, which ought rather to be stamped out so as to render the remedy unnecessary.

When psychical phenomena have been as much investigated as physical, love will also receive its cumatology—that is, its science of waves. We shall follow the curves of the emotions through the ages, their movement of rise and fall, the oppositions and side-influences by which they have been determined. Such a rising wave in our time is the growing detestation of young men for socially protected immorality, their longing for singleness in love. An opposing influence, again, is the disinclination of many young women for love. They are not content, like the neo-Protestant clergymen, with demanding that carnality shall be sanctified by marriage: they want to kill it. They do not merely hate—and with reason—desire apart from love: they depreciate love itself, even when it appears as the unity of soul and senses. According to them, marriage ought to be merely the highest form of sympathetic friendship, in conjunction with a sense of duty directed to the procreation and rearing of children. When marriage is freed from feelings of carnal pleasure as well as from claims of personal happiness, when it is the union of two friends in the duty and joy of living entirely for their children—then alone will it become “moral”!

On the other hand, love, treated as a synthesis of spiritual sympathy and the life of the race, as the vital force through which a human being’s existence is enhanced and beautified, is to them worthless; and the idea of a distinction between the nature of woman and of man is to them meaningless. They demand of both complete abstinence outside marriage, and within it they permit only certain few exceptions, which nature’s yet imperfect arrangements render necessary for the continuance of the race. With the advance of science, they hope that chemistry and biology will set humanity free from its degradation in love, just as Werner von Heidenstam expects his “food-powder” to bring freedom from degradation by hunger. Possibly they will both be right. But with these possibilities the people of the twentieth century have nothing to do. What we rather require at present is more love—and more food—not less.

It is therefore not likely that the line we have just touched upon will be that followed by the development of sexual morality, for even now an increasing proportion of mankind shows itself too exacting in erotic questions to allow of the realisation of the above-mentioned ideal of purity. No thought of the end will to their minds sanctify a means which when deprived of love appears to them ugly.

The children begotten under a sense of duty would moreover be deprived of a number of essential conditions of life; among others that of finding in their parents beings full of life and radiating happiness, which constitutes the chief spiritual nourishment of children—and it may be added that parents who “live entirely for their children” are seldom good company for them.

The programme of morality here alluded to is explicable from a justified hatred of socially protected immorality and a—partly—justified resentment against the love which leaves the child out of account. But its solution of love’s deepest conflict—that between the claims of the individual and those of the race—is prejudicial to the will of nature as well as to the conditions of civilisation. Independently of both factors, these zealots believe they can attain that white world of purity which attracts their minds, afflicted as they are by the impurity and misery with which sexual relations still load existence. They forget that above the snow-line only the poorest forms of life can flourish. But human development tends towards the production of an ever richer and stronger series of forms. Any attempt to separate morality from sensuousness will not accelerate development but only retard it, since the transplantation of sexual emotion to a soil other than that of the senses is an impossibility in our present earthly conditions.

The demand for purity which aims at non-sensuousness—or supersensuousness—may perhaps provide protection from minor dangers. In great ones it will be as futile as a hedge against a forest fire. No obstructing of appetites, but only their release in other directions, can really purify them. Passions can be curbed only by means of stronger passions. In the same appetite and the same passion in which the danger lies, in the instinct of love itself, we have the true starting-point for its ennobling. He to whom the destruction of this instinct is a passionate desire possesses in this passion itself a prospect of attaining his unnatural end. He, again, who does not wish to kill, but only to control the sexual instinct, will become, in his struggle against this desire—still immeasurably stimulated through heredity and social custom—a strong and proud conqueror only when he imagines and finally experiences unity in love. Assuredly also secondary expedients are to be found. Before all, that of acquiring the instinct of chastity from parents; of being strengthened and protected from childhood against the dangers of callousness as well as those of softness; of being instructed in a refined and gentle way of the great purpose and great dangers of sexual destiny; of receiving impressions through public opinion of the possibility of self-control and its importance to the happiness of the individual himself and of the race; of avoiding the abuse of means of enjoyment, especially of intoxicating liquors, which both directly and indirectly weaken the will-power in the case of sexual, as of all other kinds of, temptation. It is beyond question that noble sport, dancing, and games—and they are only noble when practised finely and worthily, with the mind as well as the body—are a means of replacing and controlling the sexual instinct. Equally certain is it that bodily and mental labour, whether undertaken independently or as a participation in some form of social endeavour, is important as occupying and consuming the sexual powers in a substituted form. All genuine artistic enjoyment is in the highest degree important for the ennobling of sexual life. But all this self-discipline, all these aids from the world of beauty and labour, all this cultivation of the body to strength and beauty, will be as lines without a centre so long as they do not all lead in the direction of love—love, which certain preachers of morality would leave altogether outside the question, as though even it were a danger and a temptation. No one would venture to deny that healthy habits of life and strict self-control may be elevating for the individual, even if love means nothing in his life. But life in its entirety gains nothing by the production of hardened or harassed ascetic types, which by exhausting bodily exercise, by reading that leaves the imagination arid, and by art that smothers nudity, have succeeded in lulling to sleep the sensuousness which, nevertheless, will perhaps some day awake. Life has as little joy of these harsh guardians of their “higher” nature as they themselves have of life. We have not gained much if we are to have a youth which attains sexual abstinence at the cost of other excellent qualities equally necessary to the race. A youth, with large blinkers, shunning the delights of the senses, the varied joy of life, the mobility of the fancy; a youth devoid of all spiritual adventure—such, with all its “purity,” would be a dead asset in life.

Those on the other hand who preserve but control the wealth of suggestion of the sexual life will be—even though their control has not always been complete—of infinitely greater service to existence.