Jesus, however, did not express a complicated view of marriage. His
objection to it was quite simple, as we have seen. He perceived that
nobody could live the higher life unless money and sexual love were
obtainable without sacrificing it; and he saw that the effect of
marriage as it existed among the Jews (and as it still exists among
ourselves) was to make the couples sacrifice every higher consideration
until they had fed and pleased one another. The worst of it is that
this dangerous preposterousness in marriage, instead of improving as
the general conduct of married couples improves, becomes much worse. The
selfish man to whom his wife is nothing but a slave, the selfish woman
to whom her husband is nothing but a scapegoat and a breadwinner, are
not held back from spiritual or any other adventures by fear of their
effect on the welfare of their mates. Their wives do not make recreants
and cowards of them: their husbands do not chain them to the cradle and
the cooking range when their feet should be beautiful on the mountains.
It is precisely as people become more kindly, more conscientious, more
ready to shoulder the heavier part of the burden (which means that the
strong shall give way to the weak and the slow hold back the swift),
that marriage becomes an intolerable obstacle to individual evolution.
And that is why the revolt against marriage of which Jesus was an
exponent always recurs when civilization raises the standard of marital
duty and affection, and at the same time produces a greater need for
individual freedom in pursuit of a higher evolution. This, fortunately,
is only one side of marriage; and the question arises, can it not be
eliminated? The reply is reassuring: of course it can. There is no
mortal reason in the nature of things why a married couple should be
economically dependent on one another. The Communism advocated by Jesus,
which we have seen to be entirely practicable, and indeed inevitable
if our civilization is to be saved from collapse, gets rid of that
difficulty completely. And with the economic dependence will go the
force of the outrageous claims that derive their real sanction from the
economic pressure behind them. When a man allows his wife to turn him
from the best work he is capable of doing, and to sell his soul at the
highest commercial prices obtainable; when he allows her to entangle him
in a social routine that is wearisome and debilitating to him, or tie
him to her apron strings when he needs that occasional solitude which
is one of the most sacred of human rights, he does so because he has no
right to impose eccentric standards of expenditure and unsocial habits
on her, and because these conditions have produced by their pressure so
general a custom of chaining wedded couples to one another that married
people are coarsely derided when their partners break the chain. And
when a woman is condemned by her parents to wait in genteel idleness and
uselessness for a husband when all her healthy social instincts call her
to acquire a profession and work, it is again her economic dependence on
them that makes their tyranny effective.