This sentimentality in marriage is seldom, if ever, observed in women.
For reasons that we shall examine later, they have much more to gain by
the business than men, and so they are prompted by their cooler
sagacity to enter upon it on the most favourable terms possible, and
with the minimum admixture of disarming emotion. Men almost invariably
get their mates by the process called falling in love; save among the
aristocracies of the North and Latin men, the marriage of convenience
is relatively rare; a hundred men marry “beneath” them to every woman
who perpetrates the same folly. And what is meant by this so-called
falling in love? What is meant by it is a procedure whereby a man
accounts for the fact of his marriage, after feminine initiative and
generalship have made it inevitable, by enshrouding it in a purple maze
of romance—in brief, by setting up the doctrine that an obviously
self-possessed and mammalian woman, engaged deliberately in the most
important adventure of her life, and with the keenest understanding of
its utmost implications, is a naive, tender, moony and almost
disembodied creature, enchanted and made perfect by a passion that has
stolen upon her unawares, and which she could not acknowledge, even to
herself, without blushing to death. By this preposterous doctrine, the
defeat and enslavement of the man is made glorious, and even gifted
with a touch of flattering naughtiness. The sheer horsepower of his
wooing has assailed and overcome her maiden modesty; she trembles in
his arms; he has been granted a free franchise to work his wicked will
upon her. Thus do the ambulant images of God cloak their shackles
proudly, and divert the judicious with their boastful shouts.
Women, it is almost needless to point out, are much more cautious about
embracing the conventional hocus-pocus of the situation. They never
acknowledge that they have fallen in love, as the phrase is, until the
man has formally avowed the delusion, and so cut off his retreat; to do
otherwise would be to bring down upon their heads the mocking and
contumely of all their sisters. With them, falling in love thus appears
in the light of an afterthought, or, perhaps more accurately, in the
light of a contagion. The theory, it would seem, is that the love of
the man, laboriously avowed, has inspired it instantly, and by some
unintelligible magic; that it was non-existent until the heat of his
own flames set it off. This theory, it must be acknowledged, has a
certain element of fact in it. A woman seldom allows herself to be
swayed by emotion while the principal business is yet afoot and its
issue still in doubt; to do so would be to expose a degree of
imbecility that is confined only to the half-wits of the sex. But once
the man is definitely committed, she frequently unbends a bit, if only
as a relief from the strain of a fixed purpose, and so, throwing off
her customary inhibitions, she, indulges in the luxury of a more or
less forced and mawkish sentiment. It is, however, almost unheard of
for her to permit herself this relaxation before the sentimental
intoxication of the man is assured. To do otherwise—that is, to
confess, even post facto, to an anterior descent,—would expose her, as
I have said, to the scorn of all other women. Such a confession would
be an admission that emotion had got the better of her at a critical
intellectual moment, and in the eyes of women, as in the eyes of the
small minority of genuinely intelligent men, no treason to the higher
cerebral centres could be more disgraceful.