True love is the product of the ripest development; it is therefore rare, and comes late. For this reason, as Nietzsche points out, the time for marriage comes much earlier than the time for love. It is by means of spiritual relationships that love first becomes enduring. Its prolongation is almost always effected only by an enlargement and variation of psychical relationships. Physical relationships alone soon lose through habituation the stimulus of novelty; whence we explain the fact that so many husbands, notwithstanding the physical beauty of their wives, become unfaithful to them, often in favour of much uglier women, of girls of the lower classes, or even of prostitutes. The de Goncourts remark in their “Diary” that the beauty which in a cocotte a man will reward with 100,000 francs, will not in his own wife seem worth 10,000 francs—in the wife whom he has married, and who, with her dowry, has brought him this magnificent beauty into the bargain. For this reason, a priest, when a wife complained to him that her husband had begun to get somewhat cold in his manner to her, gave the following by no means bad advice: “My dear child, the most honourable wife must have in her just a suspicion of the demi-mondaine.”
The greatest danger for love, a danger which therefore makes its appearance above all in married life, is the danger of habituation. This has a double effect. On the one hand, by the mere monotony of eternal repetition, love may become blunted.
“It is worth remarking,” says Goethe, “that custom is capable of completely replacing passionate love; it demands not so much a charming, as a comfortable object; given that, it is invincible.”
In the second place, however, custom contradicts the already mentioned need for variety, the eternal uniformity of daily companionship puts love to sleep, damps its ardour, and even gives rise to a sense of latent or open hatred between a married pair. This hatred is observed most frequently in love-matches,[175] precisely because here the ideal is all the more cruelly disturbed by the rude grasp of realities; especially if the intimate life in common enfolds a human, all-too-human, element, and tears away the last ideal veil. With justice the common bedroom of a married couple has been called “the slaughter of love.”
A further cause of unhappy marriages is to be found in unfavourable age-relations of the married couple. The most serious is the premature entrance upon marriage.
Before the introduction of the Civil Code, the age of nubility in the German Empire was attained, in the male sex, with the completion of the twentieth, in the female sex with the completion of the sixteenth year of life. In Prussia a Minister of Justice could give permission to marry at an even earlier age. According to the Civil Code, men could not marry until they were of full age (twenty-one), and women, as before, not until they were sixteen years of age. Women are able to obtain remission from this restriction, but not men. In special cases, however, a man is enabled to marry before the age of twenty-one years if the Court of Wardship (cf. the English Court of Chancery) declares him to be of full age, which the Court has power to do at any time after he is eighteen years of age.
Whilst, before the year 1900, on the average, there were not as many as 300 men under twenty years who annually contracted marriage with the permission of the Minister of Justice—already a matter for serious consideration—since the introduction of the new Code, by which the ordinary age of nubility for man is raised by one year, the number of persons prematurely contracting marriage has exhibited a notable increase. In the year 1900 there were 1,546, and in the year 1901 actually 1,848 young men married before the age of twenty-one years. These very early marriages were distributed among all professions, and almost all classes of the population.
This increase in premature marriages is, speaking generally, a symptom indicative of the premature awakening of sexuality in our own time, a phenomenon which we shall discuss more fully later. Such an occurrence as the elopement of a girl aged fourteen with a boy aged fifteen, the pair having already for some time been engaged in an intimate love-relationship, and having finally come to the conclusion that they could no longer live apart, is by no means a great rarity.[176] No detailed argument is needed to show that persons completely wanting mental and moral maturity are not suited for marriage, which can only be regarded as offering some security for endurance and life happiness, when it is the union of two fully-developed personalities. In this respect it seems to me that the regulations of the Civil Code are not at present sufficiently strict.
A second notable factor in the causation of unhappy marriages is an excessive difference between the ages of husband and wife, and in this respect it is quite an old experience, that a marked excess of age on the part of the husband has a less unfavourable influence than a similar excess on the part of the wife. This observation harmonizes with the fact that men can preserve sexual potency up to the most advanced age—even in a centenarian active spermatozoa have been found[177]—that such old men can have complete sexual intercourse, and can procreate children; whereas in women, at the age of forty-five to fifty years, with the cessation of menstruation the procreative capacity is extinguished, though not, indeed, the capacity for sexual intercourse and for voluptuous sensation. Naturally, in this connexion we are not alluding to quite abnormal cases, such as a premature impotence in the husband, or other morbid conditions in either husband or wife. We are considering merely the normal physical difference in age. Metchnikoff lays great stress upon this physical disharmony between husband and wife. He insists upon the fact that in the man sexual excitability generally begins much earlier than in woman, and that at a time when the woman stands at the acme of her needs the sexual activity in the man has already begun to decline; but this is only the case when the husband was notably older than the wife when the marriage was contracted. A difference of five or ten years in this respect is a small matter; but a difference of ten or twenty years may be of serious significance. Generally speaking, in the case of marriages which are intended to be of lifelong duration, the difference of age should never exceed ten years.
With increasing civilization, the average age at marriage has continually advanced (in Western Europe the average age at marriage is for men twenty-eight to thirty-one years, and for women twenty-three to twenty-eight years), whilst the number of persons who do not marry until late in life, and of those who do not marry at all, is continually increasing. This is partly the result of spiritual differentiation and of the ever-increasing difficulty in finding a suitable life-partner, and partly it is the result of the increasing economic difficulty in providing for the support of a household.