(3) Love lying no less completely than religious belief beyond the domain of volition, it is no less absurd for a man ‘to promise for ever to love the same woman’ than for him ‘to promise to believe the same creed,’ as circumstances may at any moment put it beyond his power to keep the promise.
(4) A man’s obligation to fulfil an engagement being necessarily dependent on his power to do so, it follows from the nature of things that on becoming unable to love any longer the woman he has promised to love steadily, a man ceases to be bound by the promise.
(5) On ceasing to love her, every man should be at liberty to withdraw from the society of his wife and take a congenial mate.
(6) It being immoral for a man to enter into engagements without a reasonable prospect of being able to fulfil them, more especially into engagements affecting in a high degree the happiness of the person or persons with whom he makes them; and the conditions of human nature precluding every human creature from a reasonable certainty of being able to love the same person for ever, it is immoral for a man and woman to promise to love one another for ever, i.e. till death, as influences lying wholly beyond their control may at any moment take from either of them the power of fulfilling his or her part of the contract.
(7) The moral and reasonable man’s largest promise of enduring affection to the woman of his choice should be nothing more than a sincere declaration, that his passion is so strong as to justify him in declaring it a state of feeling likely to endure for a considerable period.
(8) Love being a more or less transient state of the affections, marriage ought to be replaced by Free Love, i.e. by cohabitation so arranged that either party to the affectionate league is free to retire from the association at will.
The principal arguments by which Shelley brought himself to this conclusion comprise,—(a) Arguments based on consideration of the misery and moral injury coming to spouses, who are constrained to live together after ceasing to love one another; (b) arguments based on consideration of the happiness withheld by matrimonial law from uncongenial spouses, who, were it not for that law, would part company and find felicity or contentment with other mates; (c) arguments drawn from consideration of the moral injury resulting from legal wedlock to spouses, who are rendered careless of one another’s feelings by the sense of security from the proper and natural punishment of habitual perversity and ill-humour; whereas the overbearing husband would restrain his tyrannical disposition, if he knew his wife could leave him should he worry her beyond endurance, and in like manner the scolding wife would put a bridle on her tongue, if she knew her lord could dismiss her at a moment’s notice, and engage another woman in her place; (d) arguments arising from a consideration of the misery and evils resulting from marriage to individuals, other than unhappily mated husbands and wives.
(9) Of all his arguments against marriage, the one which Shelley valued perhaps most highly was the argument, grounded on his conviction that lawful wedlock and its attendant errors were accountable for prostitution, and that to sweep away the former would be to put an end to the latter. Were matrimony put on a natural footing, and made an estate from which the dissatisfied spouse could retire as easily as from any ordinary commercial contract, young men, no longer afraid to commit themselves to the perils of familiar association with modest and accomplished women, would cease to have intercourse with abandoned women. Liberated from the debasing sentiment of chastity, which retains them in servile bondage to men whom they secretly abhor, women would pass without dishonour to men, whom they could love and who would gladly provide themselves with virtuous mates on reasonable terms. The men put at liberty to take new spouses would often find them in girls, who under the existing restrictions and temptations become lodgers in immoral houses. Under Free-Love ‘the social evil’ would soon disappear, partly through the livelier masculine repugnance to feminine immorality, and partly through the larger demand for virtuous female spouses.
(10) Far from thinking the abolition of marriage would result in a state of things that would not differ greatly from promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, on account of the general brevity of the periods of cohabitation, Shelley was disposed to think that under Free Love the majority of couples would have no desire to separate, when they had been drawn closely together by common interest in common offspring. It would still remain the rule for the mated pair to live together till death; but under Free Love they would live together from preference and mutual affection, instead of living together from compulsion and in spite of mutual dislike. Still he was of course prepared for much changing and interchanging of spouses. The freedom he required was a freedom to be enjoyed and used, as well as talked about.
(11) When it occurred to John Milton that Freedom of Divorce would be abused by many a wicked man, in order to get quit of a faithful and virtuous wife, he comforted himself by reflecting that even in so evil a case the freedom would work advantageously for the good and injured woman, by relieving her from the necessity of living under the dominion of a bad husband. In like manner had any one objected to Shelley, that under Free Love a woman would often desert a good spouse from mere wantonness, and that a man would often desert a virtuous help-mate from sheer profligacy, he would have answered, ‘Better for the good man to be at liberty to seek for a woman worthy of his love, and for the good woman to be at liberty to find an honest mate.’