It would be hard to find any document in practical daily use in which
these obvious truths seem so stupidly overlooked as they are in the
marriage service. As we have seen, the stupidity is only apparent:
the service was really only an honest attempt to make the best of a
commercial contract of property and slavery by subjecting it to some
religious restraint and elevating it by some touch of poetry. But the
actual result is that when two people are under the influence of
the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of
passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that
excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do
them part. And though of course nobody expects them to do anything
so impossible and so unwholesome, yet the law that regulates their
relations, and the public opinion that regulates that law, is actually
founded on the assumption that the marriage vow is not only feasible but
beautiful and holy, and that if they are false to it, they deserve no
sympathy and no relief. If all married people really lived together, no
doubt the mere force of facts would make an end to this inhuman nonsense
in a month, if not sooner; but it is very seldom brought to that test.
The typical British husband sees much less of his wife than he does of
his business partner, his fellow clerk, or whoever works beside him
day by day. Man and wife do not as a rule, live together: they only
breakfast together, dine together, and sleep in the same room. In most
cases the woman knows nothing of the man's working life and he
knows nothing of her working life (he calls it her home life). It is
remarkable that the very people who romance most absurdly about the
closeness and sacredness of the marriage tie are also those who are most
convinced that the man's sphere and the woman's sphere are so entirely
separate that only in their leisure moments can they ever be together. A
man as intimate with his own wife as a magistrate is with his clerk,
or a Prime Minister with the leader of the Opposition, is a man in ten
thousand. The majority of married couples never get to know one another
at all: they only get accustomed to having the same house, the same
children, and the same income, which is quite a different matter. The
comparatively few men who work at home--writers, artists, and to some
extent clergymen--have to effect some sort of segregation within
the house or else run a heavy risk of overstraining their domestic
relations. When the pair is so poor that it can afford only a single
room, the strain is intolerable: violent quarrelling is the result.
Very few couples can live in a single-roomed tenement without exchanging
blows quite frequently. In the leisured classes there is often no real
family life at all. The boys are at a public school; the girls are in
the schoolroom in charge of a governess; the husband is at his club or
in a set which is not his wife's; and the institution of marriage enjoys
the credit of a domestic peace which is hardly more intimate than the
relations of prisoners in the same gaol or guests at the same garden
party. Taking these two cases of the single room and the unearned income
as the extremes, we might perhaps locate at a guess whereabout on the
scale between them any particular family stands. But it is clear enough
that the one-roomed end, though its conditions enable the marriage vow
to be carried out with the utmost attainable exactitude, is far less
endurable in practice, and far more mischievous in its effect on the
parties concerned, and through them on the community, than the other
end. Thus we see that the revolt against marriage is by no means only a
revolt against its sordidness as a survival of sex slavery. It may even
plausibly be maintained that this is precisely the part of it that
works most smoothly in practice. The revolt is also against its
sentimentality, its romance, its Amorism, even against its enervating
happiness.