to follow. Parsons and his wife called on everyone they felt should not
be neglected, later inviting to their own home those who seemed in a
position to help them. During these second visits, the conversation was
turned to what might be done by "people like ourselves" to prevent
getting into a rut. Dozens of helpful activities were recommended, and
they made it a business to explore the most valuable, so that they could
tell others about forthcoming meetings of discussion groups, plays,
lectures, and the like. Within six months, they had entirely overcome
the president's objection, and a year later Parsons was promoted to the
other position at a $2000 increase in salary.
Two facts will occur immediately to anyone who is an intelligent
observer of such things: first, Parsons and his wife had a better time
after the change than before; and second, business expects people to
discover these things for themselves. This couple were more than usually
fortunate to be led by the hand up to this new experience.
Business gave Parsons his chance when it permitted him to demonstrate
his ability. Quick jumps in business are not made available to people
upon the basis of their belief that they can qualify. Business would be
guilty of rash speculation with its funds if positions were given to any
except those who had demonstrated their qualifications in advance.
Business has no time for or patience with those who do not recognize the
importance of these things. We have no license to give responsibility to
those who say: "I didn't know that this was important. Give me a trial,
and I will do my best to learn quickly." The answer to that is: "We have
another man who has been qualifying for many years. He saw the place of
these things in business progress. We'll risk our money on him."
When a young man brings to business a reasonable amount of ability and
energy, reinforced by the emotional balance which comes from the right
kind of home life, he is likely to surpass both his own expectations and
those of his employers. Business _wants_ him to succeed. Business
wonders, as a matter of fact, why more people do not succeed, with the
incentives for success so generally open to public view. It realizes,
just as you will realize when you analyze the situation, that the
incentives have been understood, but the ways and means have been
missing. This is a common mistake in human progress. We have all erred
in making someone else want something, thinking that the process of
arousing desire would insure intelligent action. Most humans realize
that they lack the ways and means, a realization which accounts for the
interest shown everywhere in better marriage relations and in the
methods for achieving them. The desire to succeed is not enough. Desire
has its place, however, once the ways and means are understood, because
strong desire sustains interest in the ways and means.
Does this seem an idle theory? Not to business, the instrument through
which most men and women work out their economic security. Business
says: you must show us harmony at home and mental growth before we will
believe that you are a safe candidate for promotion. Give us these along
with the ability you have always brought us, and we will make it worth
your while. We will increase your salaries. We will put you into jobs
where you may live in better neighborhoods, mingle with more capable
people in business and at home, give your children advantages you may
never have had, and provide you with all the creature comforts for
successful living, a base upon which you must build your own philosophy
of happiness, but without which no genuine happiness is probable.
Being composed of realists, business does not paint these rewards in
glowing colors. It merely says, without question or qualification, _the
happily married man will occupy a bigger position with us than the man
who is unhappy at home_.
_Ernest R. and Gladys H. Groves_
CHAPTER TWELVE
_The Case for Monogamy_
If we put off examining the case for monogamy until we had personal
questions about it, most of us would never get around to studying it.
For most people no more doubt that monogamy is the best possible program
than that good health is better than bad. To argue such a matter seems
strange.
But there is much loose talk about on the other side of the case, crying
up the non-monogamous program practiced by a few and publicized by more.
The adherents of this group are so vocal that their ideas are constantly
being aired. Knowing themselves a small minority, with the burden of
proof against them, they excitedly attack the existing order.
Their arguments are likely to interest the average person, however, only
when he or she is momentarily thrown off balance by an emotional
upheaval of one sort or another. And right there is the danger. It is
hard for anyone--particularly a young person--to make a rational
decision when his thinking is colored by his emotions; his tendency is
to use his intellectual processes merely to justify what he wants to do
at the moment, and not to search out the truth. If he is unprepared for
the anti-monogamy arguments ready and waiting for him, he is likely to
accept them without question. Before we have occasion to doubt it,
therefore, those of us who take monogamy as a matter of course should
understand why we do, and what its significance is to us. Then, if ever
the occasion does arise, we shall be better able to let our minds, not
our passions, decide the issue for our greater happiness.
The question is shall I, having given myself to one man or one woman,
abide by the till-death-do-us-part vow, or shall I be free to change
partners at will?
The natural mood of most men and women entering marriage is deeply
monogamous. The one thing husband and wife crave is to depend only on
each other forever. Yet later on some of them will suddenly desert the
standards of monogamy without giving themselves time to think, and
others will pass through a period of turmoil before making up their
minds to go or to stay. What has happened in the marriage experience to
change these individuals who were strong for monogamy into men and women
either dead set against it or very doubtful about it?
The answer lies both in the particular temperament of the persons
concerned and in certain characteristic features of the early, middle,
and later stages in married life. Sometimes a young man or woman bolts
from the tenets of monogamy in a late-adolescent panic when marriage
responsibilities begin to be irksome. Sometimes it is the older man or
woman who married in good faith only to lose sight of the values of
monogamy. Not having the backbone to accept what comes and do something
about it, this type of person wants to give up as soon as the going gets
rough, and daydreams about making a better start elsewhere.
What are the parts of the marriage experience that bring out this
disposition of wanting to run away in order to try again? The romantic
love that marks the early part of marriage is a characteristically
youthful attitude. Each spouse idealizes the other and pictures their
life together as something almost unique in its perfection. Stimulated
by the mate's expectations, each one rises about his or her previous
habits of behavior, and for a while the two seem indeed to be finer and
better than the general run of humankind.
In time the first flush of enthusiasm wears off, and the husband and
wife gradually get to see each other more nearly as other people see
them. For those who flinch from reality, this is as bitter an experience
as any of the other hard parts of growing up. For nobody is it easy. But
for all who face it squarely, it is a big step toward emotional
maturity.
Without hastening the process, and thereby losing most of its benefits,
one can learn to accept it little by little, as it comes. The wife who
seemed the most beautiful or most gracious woman imaginable, the husband
who was looked upon as the strongest or cleverest man in the world,
slowly loses this impossible glamour and shrinks to the life size
proportions of a real man or woman.
When one catches a glimpse of oneself in the estimation of the newly
married spouse, and realizes how far the idealized picture is from the
somber reality one has grown up with, it is easy to think, "I am made
different by this love that expects so much of me, and if I am not yet
quite so wonderful as my beloved thinks me, I shall soon become so, for
this expectation spurs me to hitherto unimaginable efforts."
Something of this improvement does take place--but then, to the chagrin
of the one trying to improve, it becomes increasingly clear that the
original expectations of the mate are being lowered in the direction of
one's actual present level of attainment. Surprisingly enough, by the
time one is sure of this, it is not disturbing in the way one would have
expected, for one's own impression of the mate is also coming down to
earth.
At first this descent from the clouds of fanciful exaggeration of the
loved one to the lesser status of everyday life seems more or less
tragic, as both fear that the supreme quality of their marriage is
vanishing. The more a couple have been lifted up by their romantic
attachment for each other, the more they can be hurt when the wearing
out of its unreal element drops them to earth again. The ones who are
stouthearted enough to count their own hurt a small matter, if they can
still help the partner to have something to look forward to beyond the
present difficulties, are matured by this part of their marriage
experience, and later come to look back on what went before as a
dreamlike time when they lived on nothing more substantial than hopes.
This is the testing period of the marriage. Each partner must
continually get used to the new outline of the other's personality as it
is showing itself, without losing sight of the value of the essential
quality that persists. Of one thing both can be sure: each still has
need of the other.
In today's mail comes a letter from a businessman who admits that he had
got out of the habit of showing his wife how he felt about her in the
rush and worry of trying to keep his head above water financially. Now
that she in her loneliness has lost her heart to another man, the
husband almost breaks into poetry in telling of his feelings. Not
vindictive, he is just hopeless. If the wife could have had imagination
enough to realize the strength of his need of her, she would never have
wrapped herself in loneliness away from him.
The drop from the temporary bliss of the beginning of love to the
lasting burden-sharing of the rest of life offers many a chance for hurt
feelings. Those who lose confidence in their own or their partner's
ability to keep on trying to live together on a reality basis are
generally the ones who want to keep one foot in the dreamland of
immaturity. If he drinks and she sulks, both would rather think
themselves martyrs and talk over their troubles with sympathetic friends
than get down to business and do something about their problems.
Quarrels are intense in proportion to the depth of tender emotion in the
background. Not understanding what is happening to them, the husband and
wife think it is the end of love, and he may be tempted to accept
comfort from another woman, she from another man. Then they need
desperately to know, "What is the case for monogamy?"
History shows that monogamy has always been accompanied by increasing
vigor in the society or group practicing it, and that its
opposite--freedom from social restraint in the relationships of men and
women--has always been associated with social or group decay. But modern
young people are interested in the meaning of monogamy for them
personally.
Monogamy is a going on in the healthy spirit of meeting what life
brings, not running away from it. Escape into a substitute relationship
is a going back to the dreamlike stage of late adolescence, putting new
promises ahead of present performance, and attempting to make life stand
still, so that one may continue on the threshold of maturity without
ever stepping over into the place where one must make good one's
promises.
No human craving, from infancy to death, is stronger than that for
security of affection. What misleads people into thinking of going
outside their marriage association, or wanting to break it for a new
one, is their failure to understand the slow growth of permanent
affection. Looking back at the intensity of its beginning in romantic
love, they suppose it is dwindling, when it is really taking root.
As a child that has been spoiled at home has a hard time getting used to
the lesser attention he receives away from home, the married person who
believes that courtship love is the essence of marriage finds it hard to
come down to the quieter affection that can endure. This is the person
who, unable to stand being valued only for his or her real worth,
complains to an outsider, "Nobody understands me." The outsider,
flattered, murmurs, "I do," and romanticizes about "this fine,
unappreciated person," only to discover when it is too late that the
person was only too well understood by the unfortunate first partner.
One may not be able to make oneself grow up suddenly and all at once,
but one can hold on to the principles one knows to be worth fighting
for, by the simple process of refusing to let go. All kinds of wonderful
qualities needed in marriage may seem to be conspicuous in oneself
chiefly by their absence, but one can always play for time. Even if
infatuated with another person, one can hang on to what one knows is
right until Time, the mighty leveler of passion, comes to one's help.
An exceptionally happy married woman, after going through this ordeal,
said that at the time when she was almost carried away by an unexpected
infatuation for a business associate of her husband's, it seemed as if
nothing was real but the lover. Neither the memory of past happiness
with the husband nor the thought of his future misery if she should
leave him was able to mean more to her than so many words. Only, in her
half-stupefied condition, she had the wit to remember, as one might
recall the multiplication table without caring anything about it, that
she had always previously despised people who acted on impulse without
trying to find out the probable consequences. Therefore she stuck to her
self-imposed rule that she would have no contact with the man, even by
letter, until she could get over the strange numbness of her emotions
toward her husband. Then, gradually but thoroughly, she came out of her
trancelike infatuation, until she found it hard to remember that it had
ever happened.
The time to put on the brakes in checking runaway emotions is before
they gain momentum. While the feelings aroused still seem harmless, the
person can redirect his or her energy toward a more desirable object
such as finding new grounds of communion with the spouse or sublimating
its expression by turning it into constructive artistic or social
channels. To wait until disaster threatens before taking oneself in hand
is to pile up, at best, a guilty feeling that one has not done one's
best to meet the needs of the mate.
Those who "step out" in the frantic forties and foolish fifties
complicate the picture for their younger observers. What they are trying
to find is not so much a new thrill as the reliving of an old glow--the
hopefulness of their lost youth. Not content to live over in memory the
high hopes that were theirs when life was new--because of the gap
between expectation and realization--they close their eyes to the new
disillusionment they are heading for, and think only to shut out their
sense of inadequacy in their present association by steering full steam
ahead for another encounter, in which the odds are even more against
them.
One may think one doesn't care much about the partner, one may get tired
of listening to the same old jokes, the same set of worries, the same
reminiscences; but let there be a misunderstanding, and one finds that
one must care tremendously or one could not be so devastated. No
association is so humdrum that it cannot be quickened into life, no
matter how long it has been meagerly taking its course.
Certain types of people, whom we might lump together as a restless,
discontented lot, enjoy "shopping around" for doctors, for jobs, for
friends, for lovers, never staying long enough with any one doctor, job,
friend, or lover to have to take any back talk. As soon as the first
signs of a candid relationship appear, they are off, bag and baggage, to
newer hunting grounds. We may suspect that what they really want is to
outrun their own personality.
This appears in their willingness to slough off even their children, in
an adolescent impatience with any barrier to an immediate desire. So
contrary is this to nature that regret follows closely their decision.
The children, however, are laden with a burden put on them by their
parents. Instead of joyful confidence, they experience a divided
affection. Driven to a choice of loyalties or caught between competing
rivals who attempt to win their love, they are thereby denied security,
the one gift every home owes a child.
Depending as he must upon his parents for this, it is a shattering
experience for him to find that the twofold support of his existence is
no longer holding together. He wants and needs not his mother or his
father, nor just his mother and his father, but his two parents
love-linked together as the one source of steadiness in a universe which
otherwise is in flux and turmoil.
The child who finds his parents have given up trying to maintain their
affectionate interdependence is hurt beyond any other hurt that can come
to him. Precociously matured by being denied that security of
encircling affection which is his right, he is forever cheated of his
childhood and therefore can never become fully mature emotionally, but
must have great gaps in what should have been the slow development of
his emotions, before they hardened into adult form.
The monogamic fellowship normally encourages the coming of the child.
Neither husband nor wife can awaken in the other the strong normal urges
that come to expression in love fellowship, without bringing forth the
desire that seems rooted in human nature for a child of their own. In
any case, when the child does enter the home, experience soon makes
plain his need of security. Where there is no monogamic commitment, he
is forced into family life that is confused, incomplete, and uncertain.
In such a situation, open as he is to first impressions, he suffers
most, and not infrequently so deeply as to carry emotional scars for
life. The friend of children recoils from the thought of any sort of
transient motherhood or fatherhood. Monogamy provides a stable home in
which each member--husband, wife and child--although they are copartners
in love, has an indispensable, unique, and satisfying role.
Monogamy is not a fettering of human impulse, but a registration of the
deepest yearnings of men and women. The laws that define and support it
are merely man's efforts to express the common opinion that has taken
form out of the experiences through the centuries of a great multitude
of persons who, like ourselves, have sought success in marriage. Those
who think of monogamy as something imposed on human nature through
external authority, a sort of strait jacket of emotional restraint, are
obtuse to the overwhelming testimony of human nature. Monogamy is not
established by a thundering edict from Mount Sinai, but by the quiet,
persistent inward-speaking of human need. The one-man-one-woman craving
is so deeply laid in the structure of all of us that any other way of
mating and establishing a home is alien to desire, the thought never
arises, except when the one-time expectations have been lost through
personality failure.
Monogamy is not something that suddenly and finally takes shape, a
petrifying of emotion that for a season in courtship flourishes. It gets
its vitality through a growth process, continues with life, a spreading
of an affection always forward-looking; anything else is an indication
of a faltering marriage. In the beginning love announces the awakening
of mutual need. Then the feelings flow swift and strong and carry each
toward the other. The impulse to possess, to annex, to have possession
of the beloved, is a consuming hunger. It is a covetous grasping, a
recognition that the other is indispensable. Out of this comes a union,
and from then on, the two grow not only together, but also their common
fellowship grows, becoming their way of life.
The passion to possess the other one, who seems external, fades away,
and in its place comes the joy of mutual sharing, the security of an
exploring fellowship. It is thus that monogamy offers love its
fulfillment. There must be this welding of self with self if the
emotionally awakened man or woman is to escape loneliness.
Self-expansion in power, distinction, or pleasure does not suffice. Any
by-oneself fulfillment only brings home the profounder need of a
different achievement, not in separation, but through union, the fusion
of two persons in a constant intimacy.
This growing together comes from no deliberate, effort-making program.
It grows out of the affectionate living together. It is a day-by-day
consolidation, not only of interest or experience, but of satisfactions.
It is this that led Plato long ago to say that the man or woman apart
from the other is incomplete, a partial person, hungering for the needed
lover. Monogamy is, however, not a mere getting together; it is a
growing together. It furnishes the opportunity for continued unrivaled
intimacy, and its on-going not only strengthens the life together, but
makes it pregnant with the forces that lead to character growth.
Monogamy is therefore a preference, usually so much a matter of course
as to seem the natural way of living. This explains its supremacy among
the schemes of human mating. It is a product of love ties, but only as
these flourish in a maturing intimacy. It asks no more than that each
member of the fellowship grow with the other.
Monogamy is indeed a test of character, but not in some extraordinary,
aristocratic way that would put it out of the reach of most of us.
Although its benefits cannot be had for the mere asking, it is denied to
no one who in sincerity lives in love with the person of his choice. It
is an achievement, but not in the sense that one eventually awakens to
discover that he has at last arrived at a monogamic relationship. It is
rather a hand-in-hand walking through life of a man and woman, each
having chosen the other and offered his every possession. It as surely
adds to character as it demands character.
The vitalizing union provides incentives that enrich both character and
ambition. The two sharing a common life add more, do more, and feel more
than each found possible in their one-time isolation. This in turn
strengthens the union and makes each more indispensable to the other.
They do not attempt to duplicate each other, but knowing that their love
is secure, each gains through the life contact of the other. It was thus
that Robert and Elizabeth Browning each affected the quality of the
other's work, both being able to write deeper and more human poetry as a
result of their marriage.
It is most important for an understanding of monogamy that it not be
thought of as a monotony, a petering out of the energy of love until the
high hopes of the confident lovers disappear in a drab, toilsome
existence. This fading out does come to married people just as it does
to those who have never married. Rightly used, however, monogamic
fellowship protects by making adventure in life more zestful because it
is shared. However hard and dreary experience becomes, it is more so if
one walks alone and less so if its testing is met by two who travel
onward in love. Monotony is always a reflection of inner losses. So long
as we are alive to what is, so long as we have the feelings that uncover
the zestfulness of things, we keep out of the desert. Monogamy cannot
guarantee enthusiastic living, but undoubtedly, by encouraging mutual
love, it protects the roots from which most of all each of us draws
vitality.