Part 10

Hence the conflicts which manifest themselves so strangely and so fiercely in our lives. The emotional-self refuses, at times, to be controlled by the reason-self. Restraint cannot do much, and indeed, often brings deeper evils. For our unconscious selves are stronger than all the pretenses and guards we have set up by our conscious wills, either as individuals to encourage our own conceit and egoism, or collectively as a so-called civilized people in the hope of controlling conduct.

That is why so much that is said to-day about sexual conduct is so foolish. The real question is not what _people ought to do_, but what they _actually do_ and _want to do_, and, therefore, are likely _to go on doing_. It is these facts that the reformers of marriage almost always fail to face.

To me, one thing, at least, is certain, the romantic view of marriage has failed us.

But we cannot change the ideal of to-day unless we have ready a new ideal to inspire our conduct. We cannot destroy a sanctuary unless we first build a sanctuary.

There is a strange idea among some young people to-day that sexual happiness can be gained by breaking away from all the traditional bonds, it is the visible sign of our confusion as a people, and the want of happiness in our lives. The new generation should not set at naught the experience of the ages.

The individual household where both parents share in the common interest of bringing up the children, is the foundation on which marriage has been built up, and on which it must stand. If the conditions of the home are seriously changed, and the bearing and caring for children is no longer considered an essential part of marriage, a change in marriage itself will follow. I do not think you can hold the one if you let the other go. For Westermark is right, and children should not be regarded as the result of marriage, but marriage as the result of children. And love between men and women implies duties and responsibilities that go out beyond themselves; without this, even love of the most passionate kind, loses its quality and tends to become an ephemeral or even a corrupt thing.

There is much stupidity in the view of many reformers of marriage who fail to see that, however hard it is to live faithfully to the obligation, and unchecked responsibilities of love, the old ideal of marriage does so appeal to our emotional nature, that men and women are seriously unhappy in trying to destroy it.

Not all who cry “It is useless,” can do without the limiting safeguards of children and of legal marriage. We still feel the serpent’s sting of jealousy and the old questions, “Where do you come from?” “What have you been doing to-night?” “Who handled your body till daytime, while I watched and wept?” “In what bed did you lie and whom did you gladden with your smile?” are still felt, even if not uttered by the lips, of the most emancipated husbands and wives. For our sex-judgments are not intellectual, nor are they merely moral; they are not just questions of understanding and forgiving, but they are also physical, of the nerves, of the blood, of the fiercest instinct.

Fortunately it is easier to talk of love’s freedom, than it is to act as if it ever could be free. And in spite of what advanced people say, some feeling of duty in sex will always exist as long as it hurts us at all to hurt others. The immorality that says, “Do what you desire irrespective of others,” is as yet beyond most of us.

Attempts to solve these problems quickly are bound to fail. Intellectual revolutionists are, I think too hopeful with regard to what may be done to produce a harmony of sexual needs. The optimism that once prevailed in regard to economics is being transformed to sexual matters. Once people supposed that if every one followed his own interests a harmony would automatically establish itself in the economy of society. Now they tend to say the same about sex.

Intellectual views of life and what is right and wrong always act to break people into groups, each struggling to explain everything according to one theory, built on a single principle. And as the result of caring so much for one thing, people seem quite unable to grasp any facts that do not refer to their own particular reform; they are not able even to consider it as part of a world in which there is anything else. All the evil in marriage? is due to too large families and populations pressing upon the food supply, we are told by one class of enthusiasts, while others point to men’s tyranny over women. Emancipation for women, with an equal moral standard, would have a magical effect: men are all bad say some. The father is a parasite, unnecessary except for his share in begetting the child; the mother is the one parent. All would be well if legal marriage were abolished and motherhood made free, is the view common among one class of reformers. Eugenical breeding and sterilisation of the unfit is the remedy brought forward by others. Many suggest economic changes and the endowment of motherhood.

But the matter is not so simple as these reformers seem to believe. And I doubt if any outward change is really capable of producing the prompt kind of penny-in-the-slot results that its supporters claim that it can. The complexity of marriage (in particular, the occurrence of sexual disharmonies so present and active for misery to-day) is ignored by all intellectual reformers. It is because they have no emotional hold on life as a whole that they find it easy to squeeze all life into their magic theories. For myself I can see no sure remedy—though in a later essay I shall try to suggest a palliative: but were I asked to state my deepest belief, I could say only “A few thousand years more of development, a growth towards consciousness and a fuller understanding of the meaning of life.”

MARRIAGE REFORM

Many people seem to be in fear that any change in the marriage laws will destroy marriage. “Hands off! No tinkering with marriage!” they cry in a panic of timidity and moral anger.

I marvel at this want of faith. Do they, indeed, believe that the institution of marriage rests on a trembling quicksand, so that its supporters are compelled to build a scaffolding of lies to sustain its foundations?

The laws of marriage are only the register of what marriage is: they do not control marriage. There are no laws, for instance, to regulate the perfect love-unions of birds, whose faithfulness and family life present a beautiful and high standard of conduct.

Let there be no mistake here. I have been told that I wish to destroy permanent marriage, that I do not consider the welfare of children and the best interests of the race. I deny these charges; they are untrue.

My ideal of marriage is one that many will call old-fashioned. It demands the consecration of the mother in service to her husband, to their children, and the home. That is why I advocate the recognition and regulation of other forms of union, not because I have a low ideal, but to prevent the degradation of marriage by forcing into it those who do not desire, and, therefore, are unsuited for, its binding duties.

The immense failure of marriage to-day arises from the confusion of our desires and our ceaseless search for individual happiness. We have no firm ideal, no fixed standard of conduct either for women or for men. And the existence of many standards of what ought to be done; the liberty permitted to the man, the liberty permitted to the woman; if the wife shall continue her work or profession or remain at home dependent on the husband’s earnings; whether the marriage shall be fruitful or sterile—these are but a few of the questions left undecided. And thus to leave men and women unguided, with their own ideas of what is good to do and what is evil, is the dry-rot very surely destroying the ideal of marriage.

Every couple starts anew and alone, and the way is too difficult for solitary experiments.

This modern delusion of looking at marriage as an individual affair is of course, the essence of the selfish, egocentric habit of life—it focuses desire on personal adventure and personal needs. With more courage to face the realities of love we should have a surer ideal. There would be less sentimentality, but much deeper feeling about marriage.

This, then, is what I would teach: No longer must marriage be regarded solely as a personal relationship. Marriage is a religious duty.

“To be mothers were women created, and to be fathers, men.”

This was the ideal which gave the breath of life to marriage among the men and women in our earlier England, who were more fixed in character and less selfish than we are to-day.

It is this ideal we have lost.

TO-DAY’S IDEAS ON MARRIAGE

ARE WE SEEKING VAINLY AFTER HAPPINESS?

The love-story of to-day differs in one essential way from the love-story of yesterday. Yesterday’s love-story always had a youthful hero and heroine, and ended with the marriage bells. To-day’s, which is a far harder love-story to write, begins with marriage. Moreover, the bride and bridegroom are rarely young, nor are they ravishingly beautiful.

Earlier authors in short, shirked the real problem of marriage. They ended where they should have begun. For the main difficulties, in that always difficult adventure of the two learning to live as one, do not lie in youth, the period of quick adaptation, of easy falling in love. The trouble does not often begin in the courtship or honeymoon days; but it comes later in the struggle to harmonise and bend the character to the demands and lessons of marriage, and in the continued effort of maintaining love _after knowledge of love has come_. There is the difficulty. The preservation of love when all the passionate preliminaries are over.

Love is not walking round a rose garden in the sunshine; it is living together, working together. And the honeymoon is as trifling as the hors d’oeuvre in comparison with wedded life, and as unable to satisfy the deep needs of women and men. And the greatest difficulty rests in the fact that very few of us understand what our deeper needs are. Even to ourselves we are strangers. That is one reason why marriage is always difficult.

You see so often the partner one falls in love with does not make a good life companion. It’s all very well to moralise, but you can hardly ever be certain beforehand how these relations will turn out. There is physical attraction and passion, and there is affection—just being pals with each other. Who is to know which is the more necessary—the better for happiness of these two? You ought to have both, but few couples are so fortunate as that. We are almost all of us divided in our desires and our wills as also in our love.

The boys or girls to-day are, I think, more natural. There is much greater openness and less pretence. Even our novelists frankly say that every woman looks with special interest on a well formed man. There is no convention marking this as improper, “the baser side of love.” We Victorians were everlasting children in an everlasting nursery; we did not play with love, but we fiercely refused seriousness towards the fundamental emotions. Perhaps that is why we lost the old firm tradition of marriage and its duties, and why we have succeeded in putting nothing in its place.

The disease of our wills and the sickness of our souls has rust-eaten into marriage. We are doing nothing because we are too frightened to be serious. We have sought to drown our unhappiness and the exhaustion of our souls, to fill emptiness with pleasure; to place the personal good in marriage above the racial duty; to forget responsibility, and, in so doing, inevitably we have turned aside from essential things.

We have missed happiness in trying to grab at it.

Cannot you see what is wrong? We are so terribly tired of this search for something that we never find. We are like little lost children, we run, this way and that, we cry and make much noise, in fear, seeking for our mothers. Yes, our adventures are the tricks of the child who fantasies so as to pretend that everything is right when in reality everything is wrong.

Love is a dream to those who think but a terrible reality to those who feel.

The frequent and tragic failure of so many marriages arises from a confusion of our values and our undisciplined wills. In one way we expect too much from love, while in another we expect too little. What we have lost is any fixed standard of duty. I have said this before: I must say it again.

Marriage has ceased to be a discipline, it has become an adventure.

It is, little as we may believe it, the search for deeper and more perfect love that so often endangers love. Seeking, always for the one satisfying mate, we must find a partner corresponding in every respect to our ideal. The man in Mr. Hardy’s novel, “The Well-Beloved,” spent forty years in trying to do this, and his ultimate failure is typical of the experience of most of us.

Fools and blind, we neither understand nor seek the cause of our failure.

We need a new consciousness of our social spirit and racial responsibilities in marriage: the idea of handing down, at least as much as we have received. We are the guardians of the Life Force. Let us honour ideals of self-dedication; of fixed obligations of the one sex to the other, of duties to our children long before they are born, and let us spread the New Romance of Love’s Responsibility to Life; then there will be in society in general and not in a mere fraction of it, happiness in marriage and passionate parenthood.

WHY MEN ARE UNFAITHFUL

There is a question I would ask all wives, whose husbands having left them, are to-day seeking relief in the divorce courts. What was it that first sent your man away from you? What was it that first turned him from the safe happiness of marriage to seek the restless unhappiness of unregulated love?

It will not do to dismiss this question with the old unreasoning condemnation of men; nor will it serve to talk of their polygamous nature and uncontrolled passions. Let us look at the matter a little more closely, and with greater regard to truth.

In marriage the woman dominates more often than usually is known. For one thing she has the children on her side. I think marriage is more of a duel than usually is acknowledged. One partner wins, kills the other, kills all that makes joy and life—makes the one who conquers a captain; the other—the conquered one, a servant, slave—what you will. It is so always, more or less. And in this marital duel there is no quarter; and, nine times out of every ten, it is the woman who holds the cards; she who wins. If she is clever, she knows this—knows the game is in her hands. But the dice she has to throw is her sex, and she has only been allowed one throw! And when she has thrown wastefully—Yes, it is here that disaster enters into marriage and makes tragedy of the game of life.

But there is another side—and a side that is of immense importance to women.

Undeniably the greatest function of any man in the life of the average woman is to be the father of her child. All other things he means to her are secondary to this. For this reason, after the birth of her first child, she frequently ceases, though she does not know it, to love her husband as a man, and for himself.

The feeling of a child against a woman’s bosom is more to her than the kiss of a lover or the devotion of a husband. What is it that she feels? It is a liberating power; a sensation of unaccustomed unity—like a strong tide that carries her over everything, makes her unconscious of the worry of the days. It is life itself. It irradiates all the world about her, all that belongs to her—her very soul. She has become one with life—a creator, as a god.

That is why so often the man—the husband and the father, finds himself left outside this charmed circle of life.

And even when the marriage is childless (as happens most frequently in the marriages that come to the divorce courts), this same passionate, grasping maternity acts—indeed, acts sometimes with added fierceness and even more disastrously. She mothers her man, but she does not love him. She gives him the protection that she should have given to her children but she holds back the inspiration and the spur that he most needs from her.

The woman’s life so often is filled with attending her children or her husband, whom she loves (I must press this home again), where she has no children, not as a mate, but as a child. She ceases to consider him as a man—to belong to him as completely as he belongs to her.

She holds back more and more of herself—the vital part that he wants, while, at the same time, she demands more and more from him. The man feels that he is losing, giving up his individuality with all that he cares for most, and, after a period of loneliness and unhappiness, broken, probably, with some bluster and conflict, he gives in and begins not to care.

The result in the end is almost certain. The lower types of husband from time to time, will break away and find compensation in wild love. Some will seek distraction in work, or will develop a temper and nerves. Other men of more refinement will suffer much more, till they too break away at last; they will turn from the reality of life to dreams, unless they too seek and find love and sympathy with some woman, who, without the binding security of marriage, is more careful to understand them and to love them for themselves.

Most wives have yet to learn the deeper responsibilities of love; and this not at all in regard to their duties to their husbands, which most often are too perfectly fulfilled, but in the more intimate and far more exacting task of giving them spiritual freedom as well as sympathy and understanding.

I believe that this failure on the part of so many wives, in holding back just what the man most craves and seeks for, is the real cause, to which all other causes are subsidiary, of that failure in the continuance of the husband’s love, which brings so many marriages, which started in happiness, to the disaster of the divorce courts.

In my opinion, the greatest cause of error is in women’s limited experience which makes their judgments hard. While another cause arises from the tendency, and already I have emphasised more than once (a tendency due to a deep inner cause of sex difference) to throw the whole blame for sexual sins upon men. Some women carry sex antagonism like a flag, which they flourish in every wind. These are, of course, a small minority, but the majority of women fail to take a wide, sane view both on this question of the unfaithfulness of husbands and that of the whole physical relationship of marriage.

And the remedy? Yes, that is the difficult matter. We cannot alter these inharmonies of love by any cut-and-dried reforms. The expression of sex is a question largely of understanding. Its regeneration must begin with a movement, in particular, on the part of women, towards a truer acknowledgment of their own natures and an acceptance of men’s needs.

I dare to think of such a regeneration of Love, but it must come through education in consciousness and a fuller understanding of life. And by education must be understood all that influences the unconscious as well as the conscious self, so that our full life may be lived in harmony, and not with one half of ourself in enmity with the other half.

WHY WIVES ARE UNFAITHFUL

It may, and I expect will, be said that I am looking at this question of faithfulness in marriage from the man’s side only. This is not because I do not see and sympathise with the woman’s position. I am thinking really just as much of one partner as of the other. What I wish to do is to focus attention. For this reason, I am insisting upon the fact, of the wife’s coldness as being most often the first cause which drives the husband from his affection and his duty. I do this because it is just the real cause that is almost always neglected, unrealised, in particular, by women themselves.

Women have been taught to believe, and do really feel, that by sexual unfaithfulness a husband does them the cruellest possible wrong that a man can do to a woman.

It is rare to find a woman who is not sexually jealous. To possess and to hold, even when she has ceased to desire the possession, is a quality that is exceedingly common in wives. And our iniquitous divorce laws, with their obsession with sexual offences, help to maintain this view of marriage.

But is the man ever wholly to blame? It is so easy to talk self-righteously of the unfaithfulness of men—of their polygamous nature and their attraction to wild love.

I never heard such nonsense. Men are the most faithful creatures alive. After all, almost in every case, the man has given away only what his wife has shown him she does not want for herself. As long as she desires him, indeed, often, _as long as she will put up with him_, her man will stick to her—yes, _stick with the closeness of the proverbial burr_.

Most English wives always are acquiescent, rather than passionate in the sexual embrace. Even when in love, they are shy and often unresponsive. Hiding what they feel, rarely showing their husbands that they want them with any real desire. Then, after a few years of marriage, his embraces are either evaded or repulsed, if not, they are _suffered as a duty_.

Everyone who does not blink facts, knows that the vast majority of marriages are unhappy owing to the coldness of the wife. Very often this starts from the beginning of marriage. The wife is disappointed: she finds the husband different from the lover of her dreams.

In the story of _Beauty and the Beast_ we have material out of which part of the great sex difficulty can be explained. In the fairy story, the husband, who before marriage looks like a beast, after marriage, becomes a prince. In real life the story is inverted. There is a deluding force in the mere skin and limbs of those of the opposite sex at the time when maturity is reached which may give princely attributes to those who would be seen as beasts at other times. The prince seen as a beast after marriage is a tragedy into which the romantic, ignorant girl must beware of drifting. The man who most boldly plays up to the romantic part expected of him, reciprocating to the perhaps unconscious encouragement of the girl—is not the man who will be most agreeable to live with. I believe there is real danger in the sentimental view of love that is common to most girls. They do not know the poverty of feeling that loudly expressed sentiment may hide. The defect of many unfaithful lovers is not sensuality, but sentimentality. The lower types of lovers are strangely, almost incredibly sentimental.

It cannot, I think, be denied that sexual anaesthesia is present in many women and there would seem to be evidence that even where it is not present before experience of love, it arises _after marriage_. Any number of wives are unable to give themselves up to the sexual act in such a way as to derive from it real satisfaction and the gladness and health that it should give. This is a very grave matter. The evil would be less if these frigid women did not marry, but as a rule they do marry. It is a curious fact that women who sexually are cold, are sought as wives with greater frequency than are more passionate women, probably because their easily maintained reserve acts as a stimulus to the man’s desire. Men are persistently blind in these matters. They want response to their own love in their wives, but most of them are very much afraid of any woman who possesses the strong passion to enable her to give such response.