Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

The sanctity and loftiness of one’s own feeling is the indestructible part of happiness in love. No longer to be able to love is the greatest sorrow. But a person no more becomes less worthy of love because his own love is dead, than he becomes so through leaving love unrequited.

Therefore, he alone can feel himself really ruined who has been nothing but the means of another’s pleasure or sport, development or work; a means that is cast off when it no longer affords enjoyment or profit. The person who is thus betrayed in love, either because love never existed or because its past existence is denied; who sees the personality he loved unveiled as another than he believed himself to be loving—this person must exert his whole soul to save it from being narrowed, embittered, and destroyed. All other great blows of fate may be borne in such a way that a man grows by them: but to lose faith in a human being is the greatest pain of all, since it is also the most unfruitful; since it in no respect enlarges the soul or enhances the existence.

But even from this suffering the soul may finally raise itself through the consciousness that it has too great a value of its own to allow itself to be destroyed by the baseness or pettiness of another. Only he who has fought out the battle alone in all the horrors of the desert night knows what the sunrise is. Years later it may fall to the lot of such a man, who at one blow has lost everything—the sanctity of his memories, the meaning of his experiences, the faith of his love—himself to see the truth of the great, calm thinker’s exhortation: that one ought neither to laugh nor weep at, exalt nor curse a human being’s actions, but only to try to understand them (Spinoza). And then there begins for him a great and difficult work, which perhaps will last as long as life lasts, the work of looking into the depths of this other soul; of again reviewing the past in the perspective of distance; of perceiving his own limitations as well as those of the other, and thus beginning to understand. This is the only forgiveness there is.

But thus a person once dead and buried in the midst of life may finally see the grass grow green and the sun shine over his grave.

If this can become true—and it has become true for many people whom others regarded as broken-hearted—how much more then is it not true to him who has once been really rich and has never been robbed of his greatest treasure, the glory of his own love?

A woman, for example, who for years of her life has possessed complete happiness and through this has become a mother—will she be robbed of it all, if this happiness comes to an end?

There is still the happiness of others to serve, the sufferings of others to alleviate, the great ends of humanity to further. To many a one who has never even had a happiness of his own this must still be sufficient consolation. But we judge of happiness as of wealth. That innumerable human beings daily perish from want makes little impression on us. But if one of our friends falls from riches into poverty, this seems to us dreadful. We forget that he may perhaps, through poverty, attain a development that riches never won for him; that he who is robbed by fortune may make a new position for himself.

Life has countless possibilities as well as countless contradictions. It is full of secret remedial powers as well as of hidden causes of death. And, finally, it is, therefore, very uncertain whether it is not the two who come together that are “torn asunder”—while the one abandoned remains whole.

For loving is a healing medicine even for the wounds love gives. Only one thing a loving person cannot bear, to see the dear ones suffer. To take one’s self silently away in order to spare them pain is within the power of great love. And this does not mean a tame resignation watering the red stream of the blood. It means that love has become so great that it takes seriously the great words so lightly uttered in happiness, that torments caused by the beloved were dearer than joys given by others. When love has become the power in which a person lives and moves and has his being, the words of the Epistle to the Corinthians on love are fulfilled in a more beautiful way than Paul dreamed of. Great love does not only love for the sake of loving; it attains the incredible: to love the loved one more than one’s own feeling. If it were a question of thus providing for the other a more perfect happiness, this love would be able to quench its own flame and with it the fulness of pain and of joy that life had gained from this feeling. Women sometimes make such a sacrifice. Here and there a man has been capable of it. But he who has attained to this height of emotion lives so wonderful a life that the happiness the united couple create for each other must be extraordinarily great if these two rich ones are not in reality to be the poorer.