Letters to a daughter

by Hubert Bland

And when you have lost romance you are no longer “in love.” You may still love and be loved. You do and are, if all things go well with you, both; but you are no longer “in love.” The very feelings which attracted you to start with, which brought you together, are gone, and gone for ever.

That is the stupendous fact of marriage; it kills the thing that made it. It is the outcome of illusion. People in love imagine that marriage is a continuance of the feelings, intensified, which they have for each other before they enter upon it. That, Alexa, is exactly what it is not. It is the very opposite of that.

Most people will tell you—one hears it said all about, especially just now—that the reason why marriage is not the success it might be is that married people “see too much of each other.” There is something in that, no doubt, but there is more not in it, so to speak. It is not, I am convinced, so much because married folk see each other every day that romance takes wings; it is rather because they can make sure of seeing each other every day. It is the sense of security that kills.

I verily believe that an odalisque in an Oriental harem, for whom a visit from her lord is some sort of an event, a thing which may or may not happen on any particular day, has a better emotional time of it than the wife in a suburban villa who knows that her husband will appear at the front door, little black bag and all, ten minutes after she has heard his train puff into the station, or the still more unfortunate lady who can always get speech of him by just calling up the stairs.

Your poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti once told a friend of his, and of mine, that all those exquisite sonnets of his, dedicated to his wife and to wedded love, were written when Mrs Rossetti was away on long visits. That I can well believe, and I believe moreover that they were written not only when she was away, but when he was not at all sure when she would come back.

Once in a little walled town in the South of France I saw a play in which the husband and wife used to make assignations to meet and dine in a private room at a restaurant, although they had an excellent cook at home. It was a silly little play, but the dramatist knew something of human nature and of marriage, all the same. Poor dears, they were trying after something which they could not get, of course, but still, the very fact that they did try proves something, doesn’t it?

Intimacy, security—these are the fatal diseases of marriage. I think I see you gibe a little at the word “security,” and murmur something cynical about divorce. You are right in a way and wrong in another way. One has only to look around one to learn that marriage is by no means synonymous with security; but all of us, when we marry, believe it is, and so the result is the same.

Mention of divorce suggests to me to say this. I don’t believe that the sort of thing which leads to the divorce court, and, where quite uncivilised people are concerned, to the Old Bailey, is half so often, as most suppose, the outcome of wilful incontinence or of sheer naughtiness, no, nor even of the waning of love. It is the passion for something that marriage does not satisfy—the passion for Romance. The unfortunates yearn, yearn with an irresistible yearning, for something to happen, something unusual, something with a spice of danger in it, something which pulls at the heart’s strings, something to make one wake up in the morning with a feeling that the eggs and bacon for breakfast are not the most exciting prospect of the day. Ah, heaven! Don’t we all know it—the coldest, the oldest, the most austere of us!

I formed this opinion entirely out of my own head years ago, and it was curiously confirmed by an experience of three days I once spent in the divorce court. It was when I had that tiresome Chancery suit—you remember, about Ida’s marriage settlement—and I had to waste a lot of time in the law courts.

I could not sit and listen to the Chancery counsel prosing over technicalities, and so I passed the days in a court which touches human nature a trifle more shrewdly and less expensively.