CHAPTER VII
THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE
§ 170
Those who marry from merely physical sexual motives, who overemphasize or overweight the physical side of sex, are not able to gain from marriage what the rationally controlled love episode can give them. They naturally never admit that this is the case. They frequently do not know it themselves.
They think perhaps that they are putting the love instinct ahead of the egoistic-social, but their knowledge of men, women and things is defective.
They are to a certain degree anesthetic in the etymological sense, because they do not know how to live most fully. They are in a position similar to a child who should find a package of new thousand-dollar bills, and take them out into the street and play with them. They are infantile in appreciation of values, which, however, they may later learn.
To overweight the physical factor in the love between the sexes and to place the love motive ahead of the egoistic-social motive are not by any means the same thing. It has been already indicated that the overweighting of the physical factor proceeds from an egoistic motive, and is thereby vitiated as a truly human motive in the highest sense.
Both parties to such a marriage can, if they see and understand, change so as to raise the level of their own motive and give the true love motive its real place, as might be illustrated by the case of a young man who marries a woman author twenty years older than himself, motivated at first solely by the glamour of her reputation; but, finding in her a great heart and womanly qualities he had not before suspected, becomes her true mate in every sense; or the girl who, dazzled by the wealth of a suitor old enough to be her father but rich enough to “buy and sell” her father several times over, finally discovers in him a completeness and fullness of love that quite satisfies her when she realizes that, in spite of his egoistic instincts that have made him rich his love instinct is still richer. All that is necessary in a match “misgrafféd in respect of years” is the proper subordination by both partners of the egoistic-social to the love instinct.
§ 171
Unconsciously, of course, such people know from the first that they should get from each other the sweetness par excellence of human life, but while they know this unconsciously and it makes some of them uncomfortable and eccentric, even unhuman, they fancy so many inhibitions and barriers to it (particularly in the case of narrowly brought up women) that they do not gain from marriage that unspeakable and indescribable sense of identity each with the other that would successfully obviate any tendency whatever to infidelity.