Read Ebook: Modern marriage and how to bear it by Braby Maud Churton

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'So man and woman will keep their trust, Till the very Springs of the Sea run dust.

'Yea, each with the other will lose and win, For the Strife of Love's the abysmal Strife, And the Word of Love is the Word of Life.

'And they that go with the Word unsaid, Though they seem of the living, are damned and dead.'

--W. E. HENLEY.

This is a tragedy of which few men know the existence and certainly no man in these woman-ridden isles can ever have experienced. Men always treat with derision the woman anxious for matrimony, and gibe equally at the spinster who fails to attain it. Heaven alone knows why, since by men's laws and traditions the married state has been made to mean everything desirable for a woman, and the unmarried condition everything undesirable. 'People think women who do not want to marry unfeminine; people think women who do want to marry immodest; people combine both opinions by regarding it as unfeminine for women not to look longingly forward to wifehood as the hope and purpose of their lives, and ridiculing and contemning any individual woman of their acquaintance whom they suspect of entertaining such a longing. They must wish and not wish; they must not give, and certainly must not withhold, encouragement--and so it goes on, each precept cancelling the last, and most of them negative.'

Both Mr Bernard Shaw and Mr George Moore have stated in print that women frequently propose to men, and several men have confided in me details of the proposals they have received from forward fair ones. I believe it is one of the tenets of advanced women that the sex that bears the child has a right to choose the husband. Although unpleasantly revolutionary this seems eminently sane. That the right to choose a mate should be open to all adults, instead of being the sole privilege of the most selfish and least observant sex, will possibly be acknowledged in the future, when the woman question shall be set at rest for ever.

She went on to tell me in such a pathetic way how she longed to have a home and a 'nice, kind man,' to care for her, and yet no man had ever asked her; no man had ever desired her or looked on her with love; she had never known the clasp of a man's passionate arms, nor the ecstasy of a lover's kiss. It seemed very strange to me, strangely painful and horribly humiliating. I could scarcely bear to look at her while she told me these things.

There are thousands of women who feel the same, though in most cases they would scorn to own it. We hear a good deal of man's right to live; what about woman's right to love? Women are so constituted that the need for loving and being loved is the strongest factor of their being, the essential of their existence. All over the country there are lonely women of every class, leisured and working women, pretty and plain, good and bad, who are hungering and thirsting for love, for a man to take care of them, for the right to wifehood and the thrice blessed right to motherhood. In the Press the parrot cry of men echoes ceaselessly: 'Women shouldn't meddle in politics; women shouldn't do this or that--let them mind their homes and their children.' But the restless women who do these things have generally no homes or children to mind; what is the use of preaching the sacredness of motherhood when you will not allow them to be mothers? To what end prate of the duties of wifehood when you do not ask them to be wives?

It is a well-known physiological fact that numbers of women become insane in middle life who would not have done so if they had enjoyed the ordinary duties, pleasures and preoccupations of matrimony--if their women's natures had not been starved by an unnatural celibacy. This is not a suitable subject to go into here, but I recommend it to the attention of my more thoughtful readers and those who concern themselves with the amelioration of the wretched social conditions of our glorious twentieth-century civilisation.

Hardest of all is the case of the woman who longs not merely for wifehood and 'a kind man,' but more especially for motherhood, the bitter-sweet crown of the sex that celibate priests preach ceaselessly as woman's first duty and highest good, but which thousands of women in this country are debarred from fulfilling! Surely no bitterness must be so poignant as the bitterness of the woman who longs for motherhood--ceaselessly in her ears the Life Force is calling, and deep in her heart the dream children are stirring, crying, 'Give us life! give us life!' becoming more importunate every year, as each year finds the divine possibilities unrealised.

I often think how everything combines to torment a generous-hearted, full-blooded, mother-woman whose nature is starved thus. She has, of course, to suppress all emotion on the subject, to hold her head high, and endure with a smile the 'experienced' airs of girls, much younger than herself, who happen to wear that magical golden ring that changes all life for a woman; to pretend generally that she has no wish to marry, never had, and could have if she chose, to laugh at this page if she should happen to read it, and call the writer a morbid idiot--in short, she always has to act a part before a world which professes to find exquisitely humorous the fact of a woman being cheated out of the birthright of her sex. Every paper and book she picks up nowadays contains some reference to the glories of motherhood, the joys of love. Music, pictures, novels and plays, all speak of sex fulfilled and triumphant, not starved and denied like hers. The same principle is everywhere in Nature--the sky, the sea, the flowers, the green trees, the sound of summer rain--all beautiful sights and sounds have the same meaning, the same burden, the same sharp sting for her. If she is inclined to be morbid, every child's face seen in the street turns the knife in the wound; every sweet baby's cooing is another pang. 'Not for me--not for me!' must be the perpetual refrain in her mind. Her arms are empty, her heart is cold; she belongs to the vast, sad army of the undesired.

NOTE.--A clever and delightful friend of mine, a spinster by choice, takes exception to my views on the single estate. I should be deeply grieved if any words of mine were to cause pain to other women. I have said before that some of the best women are spinsters, which is sad to a believer in marriage like myself. Two of the sweetest and noblest women I know are unmarried; one of them especially seems absolutely without a thought of self, and has worked hard for others all her life, giving her powers of brain and body to their utmost limit, and the treasures of her beautiful heart generously and without stint. I beg my readers to note that I have tried to differentiate between those spinsters who do not want to marry and those who do; between the rich spinster who can command all the amenities of life, and the poor one compelled to a relentless and unceasing round of uncongenial toil. Still more do I wish to distinguish between the placid contented woman who can adapt herself to circumstances and find a quiet sort of happiness in any life--and the less well-balanced, more passionate natures, with deeper desires and an imperious need of loving. It is this need of loving stifled, crushed and fought against that awakens my profound compassion--a compassion which my friend informs me is wasted and misplaced. My readers must judge.

PART II

CAUSES OF FAILURE

'For Marriage is like Life in this, that it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.' --R. L. STEVENSON.

THE VARIOUS KINDS OF MARRIAGE

'Marriage is the great mistake that wipes out the smaller stupidities of Love.' --SCHOPENHAUER.

In one of his essays Stevenson says: 'I am so often filled with wonder that so many marriages are passable successes, and so few come to open failure, the more so as I fail to understand the principle on which people regulate their choice.'

Out of the chaos which envelops this 'principle' four special motives seem to stand out, and we can therefore roughly divide the marriages that take place into five sections thus--

If the Fates are cruel, these two are permitted to rush into matrimony. Nature has worked her will and pays no more heed. She is well-satisfied: the children born of these unions of utter madness are generally the finest and strongest, and what else does Nature care about? But for the young couple? . . . Gradually the roseate clouds lift, the intoxicating fumes are wafted away--the rapture subsides, and each awakes from the effects of the most potent drug in the universe to find a very ordinary young person at their side--and around them a chain which men name 'Forever!'

Unhappy indeed are these two if, when they stand facing each other over passion's grave, there proves to be no link at all between them except the memory of the madness that has died. Fortunately this is by no means always the case, but when it is a very unhappy married life must inevitably follow. Schopenhauer gives as the reason for such matches proving unhappy the fact that their participants look after 'the welfare of the future generation at the expense of the present,' and quotes the Spanish proverb, 'He who marries for love must live in grief.' From the point of view of the individual's interest, and not that of the future generation, it certainly seems a mistake to wed the object of intense desire unless there is also spiritual harmony, community of tastes and interests, and many other points of union in common. But under the influence of suppressed passion people lose their clearness of mental vision and are therefore more or less incapable of judging.

Let there be passion in marriage by all means--so far I entirely agree with Mr Maugham--but let it be merely the outer covering of love--a garment of flame the embrace of which is ecstasy indeed, but which, when it has burnt itself away, still leaves love a solid form of joy and beauty, erect beneath its ashes. 'Real friendship,' founded on harmony of sentiment, does not exist until the instinct of sex has been extinguished.

'Very hard to say. Oh, ecstasies aren't for this world, you know--not permanent ecstasies. You might as well have permanent hysterics. And, as you're aware, there are no marriages in heaven. So perhaps there's no heaven in marriages either.'

These sentiments are of a nature to disgust and irritate the ignorant girl of twenty by their callous unreality in her eyes, and to delight the experienced woman of, say, thirty, by their profound truth in hers--so utterly do one's ideas about life change in the course of ten years or so!

Sixty years ago George Sand wrote: 'You ask me whether you will be happy thro' love and marriage. You will not, I am fully convinced, be so in either the one or the other. Love, fidelity, maternity are nevertheless the most important, the most necessary things in the life of a woman.'

To the same effect writes R. L. Stevenson when he says: 'I suspect Love is rather too violent a passion to make in all cases a good domestic character.' Of course no very young people will believe this, but it is a horrid sordid truth that, as a rule, the happiest marriages are those in which the couple do not love too intensely. I am speaking of solid, workaday happiness, not of ecstasies and raptures. The excessive claims made by passionate love and the fevered state of mind it produces are often the cause of its shipwreck. 'If I am horrid, darling,' a girl once said to her lover, when trying to make up a quarrel she herself had brought about, 'it's only because I love you so intensely.' 'Then, for God's sake, love me less, and treat me better,' snapped the outraged lover, and we can but sympathise with him.

Another reason why the Marriage of Affection is the most likely to prove a success is because mutual respect enters so largely into its composition, and how enormously important this is in the holy estate, none can realise until they marry. I shall have more to say later about the urgent necessity for respect in married life.

WHY WE FALL OUT: DIVERS DISCORDS

'And yet when all has been said, the man who should hold back from marriage is in the same case with him who runs away from battle.' --R. L. STEVENSON.

We have discussed those types of marriage more or less doomed to failure from the outset, and now come to the reason why so many matches prove unhappy when apparently every circumstance has been favourable.

It was Socrates, I think, who said: 'Whether you marry or whether you remain unmarried, you will repent it.' The people who assert that marriage is a failure seem to lose sight of the fact that the estate was not ordained for the purpose of happiness, but to meet the necessities of society, and so long as these necessities are fulfilled by marriage, then the institution must be pronounced successful, however unhappy married people may be.

If the reasons 'why we fell out, my wife and I,' were to be considered exhaustively, the subject would overflow the bounds of this modest volume and run into several hundred giant tomes; indeed I believe an entire library could be filled with books on this matter alone. Ever since Adam and Eve had a few words over their dessert, husbands and wives have gone on quarrelling continuously and the humble philosopher who said that certain people quarrelled 'bitter and reg'lar, like man and wife,' was merely describing a condition that habit had made familiar to him.

A miserable husband who had come to the parting of the ways , once confided in me that the bitter and terrible quarrels between him and his wife always began for some utterly trivial reason, generally because he did not admire her clothes! Could anything be more pitifully absurd? 'Then why,' I asked, 'as you're so anxious to keep the peace, do you volunteer any criticism at all?' 'Oh, I never do,' was the answer. 'She asks me my opinion of a new gown, say, and gets angry when it's unfavourable. Then of course I get angry too, I'm no saint, and presently we come to curses and words that sting like blows. Then I clear out for a couple of days, and of course there's the devil to pay when I go back, and it begins all over again. Why, this present row has lasted five weeks or so, and in the beginning it was simply because I said I didn't like the ostrich feather in her hat!'

Again: I once met at a race-meeting a school-friend, long lost sight of, whom I had last seen as a newly-wedded wife, loving and beloved. She was now very much changed, hard and haggard of face. I asked after the man I remembered as a radiant bridegroom.

'Oh, he's gone the way of all husbands,' she said, with a sigh; 'liver, my dear.'

'Do you mean he's dead?' I asked, shocked and pained.

'Oh, dear, no, he's alive enough, but he's developed liver and that's killed our love,' was the cynical reply.

It had. Devotion and dyspepsia are hard to reconcile and my friend's husband had developed a nasty knack of throwing his dinner in the fire whenever it displeased him, a habit hardly conducive to home happiness.

Food, as a fact, is one of the chief sources of friction in married life. It sounds farcical, but I am perfectly serious. Food, the ordering and cooking of it and the subsequent paying for it, is one of the great tragedies of a wife's existence. Time, the great healer, mercifully deadens the intensity of this anguish, and matrons of fifty or so can face the daily burden of food-ordering with something like indifference. But to a woman who has not yet reached the fatal landmark aptly described as 'the same age as everybody else, namely, thirty-five,' it is the greatest cross, whilst many a bride has had her early married life totally ruined by the horrid and ever recurring necessity of finding food for her partner. Men make fun of women because their dinner, when alone, so often consists of an egg for tea, but women have such a constitutional hatred of food-ordering, inherited, no doubt, from a long line of suffering female ancestry, that the majority of them would gladly live on tea and bread-and-butter for the rest of their lives sooner than face the necessity of daily meditating on a menu. For this reason I believe vegetarian husbands are particularly desirable, since the whole principle of food-reform is simplicity. Those who go in for it acquire an entirely fresh set of ideas on the importance of food, and become quite pathetically easily pleased. I know a woman whose husband is a vegetarian and she declared that the food question, so disturbing a factor in most homes, had never caused her a single tear, or frown, or angry word, or added wrinkle. She assured me that her husband would cheerfully breakfast off a banana, lunch off a lettuce, dine on a date and sup on a salted almond. When the house was upset on the occasion of a large evening party and there were no conveniences for the ordinary family dinner, the creature actually ate cheese sandwiches in the bathroom, by way of a dinner, and was quite pleased to do so, moreover! I could scarcely credit it at first, but it was really true.

Of the many paltry little causes for friction in married life incompatibility of temperature has doubtless been a very fruitful source of dissension. If one shivers when the window is opened and the other is a fresh-air faddist and can't breathe with it shut, an endless vista of possibilities of unhappiness is opened out. It was, I believe, Napoleon's second wife, Marie Louise, who always got rid of her husband when she wished to, by merely keeping her apartments cold. The great man was only comfortable in a very hot room with a blazing fire.

That grievous deficiency, no sense of humour, is another of the tiny little rocks on which married happiness often splits. This is natural enough, since an absence of this priceless quality is about the worst deprivation a traveller on life's journey can suffer from. Among men the conviction is rife that women invariably suffer thus, but I think we can afford to leave them this delusion, since it affords them so much satisfaction. At one time I had a journalist friend of a painfully stodgy and unusually depressing literary habit. This poor soul fancied his vein was humour, and from him I have often endured the reading aloud of the dreariest laboured pages of japes and jests, which to his thinking were sparkling with wit. My patient, long-suffering listening only brought bitter derision for my alleged lack of humorous perception, but my criticism inspired the young man to write a cynical article on 'Women and Humour,' of the kind that editors--being men--delight in, and for which he consequently got well paid.

Writers on marriage seem to have paid very little attention to this important point. Stevenson is one of the exceptions: 'That people should laugh over the same sort of jest,' he says, 'and have many an old joke between them which time cannot wither or custom stale is a better preparation for life, by your leave, than many other things higher and better-sounding in the world's ears. You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.'

In a beautiful poem, Stephen Phillips describes how a bereaved lover can think calmly of his dead, when he looked at her possessions, the things she had worn, even when he read her letters; and her saddest words had no power to pain him, but when he came to--

'A hurried, happy line! A little jest too slight for one so dead: This did I not endure-- Then with a shuddering heart no more I read,'

In truth, the little joke shared, the old allusion at which both are accustomed to laugh, is a more potent bond than many a deeper feeling. One can recall these trifles long after one has forgotten the poignant moments of passion, the breathless heartbeats, the wild embraces which at the time seemed to promise such deathless memories. All, all are forgotten, but the silly little joke has still the power to bring tears to our eyes if the one with whom we shared it is lost to us.

A great many people are wretched who would have been perfectly happy with another partner. 'In the inequalities of temperament lies the main cause of unhappiness in marriage. Want of harmony in tastes counts for much, but a misfit in temperament for more.' So ludicrously mismated are some couples that one wonders how they could ever have dreamed of finding happiness together. This again is frequently the fault of our absurd conventions, which make it so difficult for single young men and women to really get to know each other. However, things have improved so much in this direction during the last decade or two that we ought not to grumble, but, even now, if a man show a decided preference for a girl's company his name is at once coupled with hers in a manner which can but alarm a youth devoid of matrimonial intentions. That relic of the dark ages, the intention-asking parent, is by no means extinct, and many a promising friendship that might have ended in a happy marriage is spoilt by the clumsy intervention of this barbaric relative.

A young barrister friend of mine--we will call him Anthony--once tried, for reasons of professional policy, to make himself agreeable to a solicitor with a very large family of daughters. Being a shrewd man, he selected one of the girls still in the schoolroom to pay particular attention to, and thus escaped the necessity of showing special interest in her elder and marriageable sisters. His intimacy with the family prospered, and the father became a very useful patron. However, as time went on, he discovered to his dismay that his little friend, Amaryllis, had grown up and that he was regarded in the family as her special property. Speedily he transferred his attachment to Aphrodite, the youngest girl then in the schoolroom, and by this means saved himself from an entanglement with Amaryllis, whilst at the same time preserving the valuable friendship of her father. In an incredibly short time, however, Aphrodite was nubile, and the family once more expectant of securing Anthony as a permanent member. Once again he executed the same manoeuvre, choosing this time the little Andromeda, a plain child still in the nursery. The family, though disappointed, remained hopeful, and the years passed peacefully on, bringing a few sons-in-law in their train, and innumerable boxes of sweets to the unprepossessing Andromeda. When, however, Andromeda too grew up, the wily Anthony feared his fruitful friendship must inevitably come to an end, since the only remaining daughter had already reached the dangerous age of fifteen, and bore moreover the improper name of Anactoria!

A long friendship and a short engagement is perhaps the best combination. A prolonged engagement is the most trying relationship between the sexes possible to conceive. For the woman it means the drawbacks of matrimony without its charm of restful finality, or any of its solid worldly advantages. On the man's side it means the irksomeness of the marriage yoke without any of its satisfactions and comforts. On the man, indeed, a long engagement is especially hard, as at least the woman is spared the burden of ordering his food and coping with his servants. Many a sincere affection has been killed by the restraints and irritations of a long engagement. Many a genuine passion has waned during its dreary course, until but a feeble spark of the great flame is left to light the wedded life, and both man and woman carry the mark of that suppressed ardour which, under happier circumstances, might have come to a joyous fruition. Their children, too, sometimes lack vitality, and show the need of the fire that died before they were begotten.

Much has been written of the degradation of love by habit, and Alexandre Dumas expresses the whole question to perfection in one crystal sentence: 'In marriage when love exists habit kills it; when love does not exist habit calls it into being.' This is profoundly true, and for every passion habit has killed it must certainly have created more genuine affections.

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