Marriage and Morals/Chapter IX

The prevailing attitude of most communities towards love is curiously twofold: on the one hand it is the chief theme of poetry, novels and plays; on the other hand it is completely ignored by most serious sociologists, and is not considered as one of the desiderata in schemes of economic or political reform. I do not think this attitude justifiable. I regard love as one of the most important things in human life, and I regard any system as bad which interferes unnecessarily with its free development.

Love, when the word is properly used, does not denote any and every relation between the sexes, but only one involving considerable emotion, and a relation which is psychological as well as physical. It may reach any degree of intensity. Such emotions as are expressed in “Tristan und Isolde” are in accordance with the experience of countless men and women. ​The power of giving artistic expression to the emotion of love is rare, but the emotion itself, at least in Europe, is not. It is much commoner in some societies than in others, and this depends, I think, not upon the nature of the people concerned but upon their conventions and institutions. In China it is rare, and appears in history as a characteristic of bad emperors who are misled by wicked concubines; traditional Chinese culture objected to all strong emotions and considered that a man should in all circumstances preserve the empire of reason. In this it resembled the early eighteenth century. We, who have behind us the romantic movement, the French Revolution, and the Great War, are conscious that the part of reason in human life is not so dominant as was hoped in the reign of Queen Anne. And reason itself has turned traitor in creating the doctrine of psycho-analysis. The three main extra-rational activities in modern life are religion, war and love; all these are extra-rational, but love is not anti-rational, that is to say, a reasonable man may reasonably rejoice in its existence. For the reasons that we have considered in earlier chapters, there is in the modern world a certain antagonism between religion and ​love. I do not think this antagonism is unavoidable; it is due only to the fact that the Christian religion, unlike some others, is rooted in asceticism.

In the modern world, however, love has another enemy more dangerous than religion, and that is the gospel of work and economic success. It is generally held, especially in America, that a man should not allow love to interfere with his career, and that if he does, he is silly. But in this as in all human matters a balance is necessary. It would be foolish, though in some cases it might be tragically heroic, to sacrifice career completely for love, but it is equally foolish and in no degree heroic to sacrifice love completely for career. Nevertheless this happens, and happens inevitably, in a society organized on the basis of a universal scramble for money. Consider the life of a typical business man of the present day, especially in America: from the time when he is first grown-up he devotes all his best thoughts and all his best energies to financial success; everything else is merely unimportant recreation. In his youth he satisfies his physical needs from time to time with prostitutes; presently he marries, but his interests are totally ​different from his wife’s, and he never becomes really intimate with her. He comes home late and tired from the office; he gets up in the morning before his wife is awake; he spends Sunday playing golf, because exercise is necessary to keep him fit for the money-making struggle. His wife’s interests appear to him essentially feminine, and while he approves of them, he makes no attempt to share them. He has no time for illicit love any more than for love in marriage, though he may, of course, occasionally visit a prostitute when he is away from home on business. His wife probably remains sexually cold towards him, which is not to be wondered at, since he never has time to woo her. Subconsciously he is dissatisfied, but he does not know why. He drowns his dissatisfaction mainly in work, but also in other less desirable ways, for example, by the sadistic pleasure to be derived from watching prize-fights or persecuting radicals. His wife, who is equally unsatisfied, finds an outlet in second-rate culture, and in upholding virtue by harrying all those whose lives are generous and free. In this way the lack of sexual satisfaction in both husband and wife turns to hatred of mankind disguised as public spirit and a high ​moral standard. This unfortunate state of affairs is largely due to a wrong conception of our sexual needs. St. Paul apparently thought that the only thing needed in a marriage was opportunity for sexual intercourse, and this view has been on the whole encouraged by the teaching of Christian moralists. Their dislike of sex has blinded them to all the finer aspects of the sexual life, with the result that those who have suffered their teaching in youth go about the world blind to their own best potentialities. Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives. There is a deep-seated fear, in most people, of the cold world and the possible cruelty of the herd; there is a longing for affection, which is often concealed by roughness, boorishness or a bullying manner in men, and by nagging and scolding in women. Passionate mutual love while it lasts puts an end to this feeling; it breaks down the hard walls of the ego, producing a new being composed of two in one. Nature did not construct human beings to stand alone, since they cannot fulfil her biological purpose except with the help of ​another; and civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love. The instinct is not completely satisfied unless a man’s whole being, mental quite as much as physical, enters into the relation. Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give; unconsciously, if not consciously, they feel this, and the resulting disappointment inclines them towards envy, oppression and cruelty. To give due place to passionate love should be therefore a matter which concerns the sociologist, since if they miss this experience men and women cannot attain their full stature, and cannot feel towards the rest of the world that kind of generous warmth without which their social activities are pretty sure to be harmful.

Most men and women, given suitable conditions, will feel passionate love at some period of their lives. For the inexperienced, however, it is very difficult to distinguish passionate love from mere sex hunger; especially is this the case with well-brought-up girls, who have been taught that they could not possibly like to kiss a man unless they loved him. If a girl is expected to be a virgin when she marries, it will ​very often happen that she is trapped by a transient and trivial sex attraction, which a woman with sexual experience could easily distinguish from love. This has undoubtedly been a frequent cause of unhappy marriages. Even where mutual love exists, it may be poisoned by the belief of one or both that it is sinful. This belief may, of course, be well founded. Parnell, for example, undoubtedly sinned in committing adultery, since he thereby postponed the fulfilment of the hopes of Ireland for many years. But even where the sense of sin is unfounded, it will poison love just as much. If love is to bring all the good of which it is capable, it must be free, generous, unrestrained and wholehearted.

The sense of sin which a conventional education attaches to love, even to love within marriage, operates often subconsciously in men as well as in women, and in those whose conscious opinions are emancipated as well as in those who adhere to old traditions. The effects of this attitude are various; it often renders men brutal, clumsy, and unsympathetic in their love-making, since they cannot bring themselves to speak about it so as to ascertain the woman’s feelings, nor can they adequately ​value the gradual approaches to the final act which are essential to most women’s enjoyment. Indeed they often fail to realize that a woman should experience enjoyment, and that if she does not, her lover is at fault. In women who have been conventionally educated there is often a certain pride in coldness, there is great physical reserve, and an unwillingness to allow easy physical intimacy. A skilful wooer can probably overcome these timidities, but a man who respects and admires them as the mark of a virtuous woman is not likely to overcome them, with the result that even after many years of marriage the relations of husband and wife remain constrained and more or less formal. In the days of our grandfathers husbands never expected to see their wives naked, and their wives would have been horrified at such a suggestion. This attitude is still commoner than might be thought, and even among those who have advanced beyond this point, a good deal of the old restraint often remains.

There is another more psychological obstacle to the full development of love in the modern world, and that is the fear that many people feel of not preserving their individuality in​tact. This is a foolish and rather modern terror. Individuality is not an end in itself; it is something that must enter into fructifying contact with the world, and in so doing must lose its separateness. An individuality which is kept in a glass case withers, whereas one that is freely expended in human contacts becomes enriched. Love, children, and work are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world. Of these love is usually chronologically the first. Moreover, it is essential to the best development of parental affection, since a child is apt to reproduce the characteristics of both parents, and if they do not love each other, each will only enjoy his own characteristics when they appear in the children, and will be pained by the characteristics of the other parent. Work is by no means always capable of bringing a man into fruitful contact with the outer world. Whether it does so or not depends upon the spirit in which it is undertaken. Work of which the motive is solely pecuniary cannot have this value, but only work which embodies some kind of devotion, whether to persons, to things, or merely to a vision. And love itself is worthless when it is merely possessive; it is then on a ​level with work which is merely pecuniary. In order to have the kind of value of which we are speaking, love must feel the ego of the beloved person as important as one’s own ego, and must realize the other’s feelings and wishes as though they were one’s own. That is to say, there must be an instinctive and not merely conscious extension of egoistic feeling so as to embrace the other person as well. All this has been rendered difficult by our pugnacious competitive society, and by the foolish cult of personality derived partly from Protestantism and partly from the romantic movement.

Among modern emancipated people, love in the serious sense with which we are concerned is suffering a new danger. When people no longer feel any moral barrier against sexual intercourse on every occasion when even a trivial impulse inclines to it, they get into the habit of dissociating sex from serious emotion and from feelings of affection; they may even come to associate it with feelings of hatred. Of this sort of thing Aldous Huxlev’s novels afford the best illustration. His characters, like St. Paul, view sex intercourse merely as a physiological outlet; the higher values with which it is capable of being associated appear ​to be unknown to them. From such an attitude it is only a step to the revival of asceticism. Love has its own proper ideals and its own intrinsic moral standards. These are obscured both in Christian teaching and in the indiscriminate revolt against all sexual morality which has sprung up among considerable sections of the younger generation. Sex intercourse divorced from love is incapable of bringing any profound satisfaction to instinct. I am not saying that it should never occur, for to ensure this we should have to set up such rigid barriers that love also would become very difficult. What I am saying is that sex intercourse apart from love has little value, and is to be regarded primarily as experimentation with a view to love.

The claims of love to a recognized place in human life are, as we have seen, very great. But love is an anarchic force which, if it is left free, will not remain within any bounds set by law or custom. So long as children are not involved, this may not greatly matter. But as soon as children appear we are in a different region, where love is no longer autonomous but serves the biological purposes of the race. There has to be a social ethic connected with ​children, which may, where there is conflict, override the claims of passionate love. A wise ethic will, however, minimize this conflict to the uttermost, not only because love is good in itself. but also because it is good for children when their parents love each other. To secure as little interference with love as is compatible with the interests of children should be one of the main purposes of a wise sexual ethic. This topic, however, cannot be discussed until we have considered the family.