Monogamous marriage, by its very conditions, tends to break down this
strangeness. It forces the two contracting parties into an intimacy
that is too persistent and unmitigated; they are in contact at too many
points, and too steadily. By and by all the mystery of the relation is
gone, and they stand in the unsexed position of brother and sister.
Thus that “maximum of temptation” of which Shaw speaks has within
itself the seeds of its own decay. A husband begins by kissing a pretty
girl, his wife; it is pleasant to have her so handy and so willing. He
ends by making machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the every day
sharer of his meals, books, bath towels, pocketbook, relatives,
ambitions, secrets, malaises and business: a proceeding about as
romantic as having his boots blacked. The thing is too horribly dismal
for words. Not all the native sentimentalism of man can overcome the
distaste and boredom that get into it. Not all the histrionic capacity
of woman can attach any appearance of gusto and spontaneity to it.
An estimable lady psychologist of the American Republic, Mrs. Marion
Cox, in a somewhat florid book entitled “Ventures into Worlds,” has a
sagacious essay upon this subject. She calls the essay “Our Incestuous
Marriage,” and argues accurately that, once the adventurous descends to
the habitual, it takes on an offensive and degrading character. The
intimate approach, to give genuine joy, must be a concession, a feat of
persuasion, a victory; once it loses that character it loses
everything. Such a destructive conversion is effected by the average
monogamous marriage. It breaks down all mystery and reserve, for how
can mystery and reserve survive the use of the same hot water bag and a
joint concern about butter and egg bills? What remains, at least on the
husband’s side, is esteem—the feeling one, has for an amiable aunt. And
confidence—the emotion evoked by a lawyer, a dentist or a
fortune-teller. And habit—the thing which makes it possible to eat the
same breakfast every day, and to windup one’s watch regularly, and to
earn a living.
Mrs. Cox, if I remember her dissertation correctly, proposes to prevent
this stodgy dephlogistication of marriage by interrupting its
course—that is, by separating the parties now and then, so that neither
will become too familiar and commonplace to the other. By this means,
she, argues, curiosity will be periodically revived, and there will be
a chance for personality to expand a cappella, and so each reunion will
have in it something of the surprise, the adventure and the virtuous
satanry of the honeymoon. The husband will not come back to precisely
the same wife that he parted from, and the wife will not welcome
precisely the same husband. Even supposing them to have gone on
substantially as if together, they will have gone on out of sight and
hearing of each other, Thus each will find the other, to some extent at
least, a stranger, and hence a bit challenging, and hence a bit
charming. The scheme has merit. More, it has been tried often, and with
success. It is, indeed, a familiar observation that the happiest
couples are those who are occasionally separated, and the fact has been
embalmed in the trite maxim that absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Perhaps not actually fonder, but at any rate more tolerant, more
curious, more eager. Two difficulties, however, stand in the way of the
widespread adoption of the remedy. One lies in its costliness: the
average couple cannot afford a double establishment, even temporarily.
The other lies in the fact that it inevitably arouses the envy and
ill-nature of those who cannot adopt it, and so causes a gabbling of
scandal. The world invariably suspects the worst. Let man and wife
separate to save their happiness from suffocation in the kitchen, the
dining room and the connubial chamber, and it will immediately conclude
that the corpse is already laid out in the drawing-room.