Marriage and Love

MARRIAGE AND LOVE


The popular notion about marriage and love is that they are synonymous,
that they spring from the same motives, and cover the same human needs.
Like most popular notions this also rests not on actual facts, but on
superstition.

Marriage and love have nothing in common; they are as far apart as the
poles; are, in fact, antagonistic to each other. No doubt some marriages
have been the result of love. Not, however, because love could assert
itself only in marriage; much rather is it because few people can
completely outgrow a convention. There are today large numbers of men
and women to whom marriage is naught but a farce, but who submit to it
for the sake of public opinion. At any rate, while it is true that some
marriages are based on love, and while it is equally true that in some
cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so
regardless of marriage, and not because of it.

On the other hand, it is utterly false that love results from marriage.
On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple
falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be
found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable. Certainly the
growing-used to each other is far away from the spontaneity, the
intensity, and beauty of love, without which the intimacy of marriage
must prove degrading to both the woman and the man.

Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It
differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is
more binding, more exacting. Its returns are insignificantly small
compared with the investments. In taking out an insurance policy one
pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue
payments. If, however, woman's premium is a husband, she pays for it
with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, "until
death doth part." Moreover, the marriage insurance condemns her to
life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual
as well as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his sphere is wider,
marriage does not limit him as much as woman. He feels his chains more
in an economic sense.

Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage.
"Ye who enter here leave all hope behind."