On hearing the words "love letters," does anybody ever think of a
man's letters to his wife? No more than of his letters to his mother.
He may love both his wife and his mother dearly, but when he writes
love letters he writes them to his sweetheart. Thus, public opinion
and every-day literary usage clearly recognize the difference between
romantic love and conjugal affection. Yet when I maintained in my
first book that romantic love differs as widely from conjugal
affection as maternal love differs from friendship; that romantic love
is almost as modern as the telegraph, the railway, and the electric
light; and that perhaps the main reasons why no one had anticipated me
in an attempt to write a book to prove this, were that no distinction
had heretofore been made between conjugal and romantic love, and that
the apparent occurrence of noble examples of conjugal attachment among
the ancient Greeks had obscured the issue--there was a chorus of
dissenting voices. "The distinction drawn by him between romantic and
conjugal love," wrote one critic, "seems more fanciful than real." "He
will not succeed," wrote another, "in convincing anybody that romantic
and conjugal love differ in kind instead of only in degree or place";
while a third even objected to my theory as "essentially immoral!"
Mr. W.D. Howells, on the other hand, accepted my distinction, and in a
letter to me declared that he found conjugal affection an even more
interesting field of study than romantic love. Why, indeed, should
anyone be alarmed at the distinction I made? Is not a man's feeling
toward his sweetheart different from his feeling toward his mother or
sister? Why then should it be absurd or "immoral" to maintain that it
differs from his feeling toward his wife? What I maintain is that
romantic love disappears gradually, to be replaced, as a rule, by
conjugal affection, which is sometimes a less intense, at other times
a more intense, feeling than the emotions aroused during courtship.
The process may be compared to a modulation in music, in which some of
the tones in a chord are retained while others are displaced by new
ones. Such modulations are delightful, and the new harmony may be as
beautiful as the old. A visitor to Wordsworth's home wrote:
"I saw the old man walking in the garden with his wife. They
were both quite old, and he was almost blind; but they
seemed like sweethearts courting, they were so tender to
each other and attentive."
A husband may be, and should be, quite as tender, as attentive, as
gallant and self-sacrificing, as sympathetic, proud, and devoted as a
lover; yet all his emotions will appear in a new orchestration, as it
were. In the gallant attentions of a loving husband, the anxious
eagerness to please is displaced by a pleasant sense of duty and
gentlemanly courtesy. He still prefers his wife to all other women and
wants a monopoly of her love; but this feeling has a proprietary tinge
that was absent before. Jealousy, too, assumes a new aspect; it may,
temporarily, bring back the uncertainty of courtship, but the emotion
is colored by entirely different ideas: jealousy in a lover is a
green-eyed monster gnawing merely at his hopes, and not, as in a
husband, threatening to destroy his property and his family
honor--which makes a great difference in the quality of the feeling
and its manifestation. The wife, on her part, has no more use for
coyness, but can indulge in the luxury of bestowing gallant attentions
which before marriage would have seemed indelicate or forward, while
after marriage they are a pleasant duty, rising in some cases to
heroic self-sacrifice.
If even within the sphere of romantic love no two cases are exactly
alike, how could love before marriage be the same as after marriage
when so many new experiences, ideas, and associations come into play?
Above all, the feelings relating to the children bring an entirely new
group of tones into the complex harmony of affection. The intimacies
of married life, the revelation of characteristics undiscovered before
marriage, the deeper sympathy, the knowledge that theirs is "one glory
an' one shame"--these and a hundred other domestic experiences make
romantic love undergo a change into something that may be equally rich
and strange but is certainly quite different. A wife's charms are
different from a girl's and inspire a different kind of love. The
husband loves
Those virtues which, before untried,
The wife has added to the bride,
as Samuel Bishop rhymes it. In their predilection for maidens, poets,
like novelists, have until recently ignored the wife too much. But
Cowper sang:
What is there in the vale of life
Half so delightful as a wife,
When friendship, love and peace combine
To stamp the marriage bond divine?
The stream of pure and genuine love
Derives its current from above;
And earth a second Eden shows,
Where'er the healing water flows.
Some of the specifically romantic ingredients of love, on the other
hand--adoration, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and despair--do
not normally enter into conjugal affection. No one would fail to see
the absurdity of a husband's exclaiming
O that I were a glove upon that hand
That I might touch that cheek.
He _may_ touch that cheek, and kiss it too--and that makes a
tremendous difference in the tone and tension of his feelings. Unlike
the lover, the husband does not think, feel, and speak in perpetual
hyperboles. He does not use expressions like "beautiful tyrant, fiend
angelical," or speak of
The cruel madness of love
The honey of poisonous flowers.
There is no madness or cruelty in conjugal love: in its normal state
it is all peace, contentment, happiness, while romantic love, in its
normal state, is chiefly unrest, doubt, fear, anxiety, torture and
anguish of heart--with alternating hours of frantic elation--until the
Yes has been spoken.
The emotions of a husband are those of a mariner who has entered into
the calm harbor of matrimony with his treasure safe and sound, while
the romantic lover is as one who is still on the high seas of
uncertainty, storm-tossed one moment, lifted sky-high on a wave of
hope, the next in a dark abyss of despair. It is indeed lucky that
conjugal affection does differ so widely from romantic love; such
nervous tension, doubt, worry, and constant friction between hope and
despair would, if continued after marriage, make life a burden to the
most loving couples.