What is there in the vale of life
Half so delightful as a wife,
When friendship, love and peace combine
To stamp the marriage bond divine?
The stream of pure and genuine love
Derives its current from above;
And earth a second Eden shows,
Where'er the healing water flows.
Some of the specifically romantic ingredients of love, on the other hand—adoration, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and despair—do not normally enter into conjugal affection. No one would fail to see the absurdity of a husband's exclaiming
O that I were a glove upon that hand
That I might touch that cheek.
He may touch that cheek, and kiss it too—and that makes a tremendous difference in the tone and tension of his feelings. Unlike the lover, the husband does not think, feel, and speak in perpetual hyperboles. He does not use expressions like "beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical," or speak of
The cruel madness of love
The honey of poisonous flowers.
There is no madness or cruelty in conjugal love: in its normal state it is all peace, contentment, happiness, while romantic love, in its normal state, is chiefly unrest, doubt, fear, anxiety, torture and anguish of heart—with alternating hours of frantic elation—until the Yes has been spoken.
The emotions of a husband are those of a mariner who has entered into the calm harbor of matrimony with his treasure safe and sound, while the romantic lover is as one who is still on the high seas of uncertainty, storm-tossed one moment, lifted sky-high on a wave of hope, the next in a dark abyss of despair. It is indeed lucky that conjugal affection does differ so widely from romantic love; such nervous tension, doubt, worry, and constant friction between hope and despair would, if continued after marriage, make life a burden to the most loving couples.
WHY SAVAGES VALUE WIVES
The notion that genuine romantic love does not undergo a metamorphosis in marriage is the first of five mistakes I have undertaken to correct in this chapter. The second is summed up in Westermarck's assertion (359-60) that it is
"impossible to believe that there ever was a time when conjugal affection was entirely wanting in the human race … it seems, in its most primitive form, to have been as old as marriage itself. It must be a certain degree of affection that induces the male to defend the female during her period of pregnancy."