It was Sir Francis Jeune, afterwards Lord St. Helier, and President
of the Divorce Court, who first called attention to the strange
significance of the Eighth Year of married life. “The Eighth Year,” he
said, “is the most dangerous year in the adventure of marriage.”
Afterwards, in the recent Royal Commission on Divorce, this curious
fact was again alluded to in the evidence, and it has been shown by
statistics of domestic tragedy, by hundreds of sordid little dramas,
that at this period in the partnership of husbands and wives there
comes, in many cases, a great crisis, leading often to moral disaster.
It is in the Eighth Year, or thereabouts, that there is the tug-of-war
between two temperaments, mated by the law, but not mated, perhaps, in
ideals, in ambitions, or in qualities of character. The man and woman
pull against each other, tugging at each other’s heartstrings. The
Eighth Year is the fatal year, when if there is no give-and-take, no
working compromise, no new pledges of loyalty and comradeship, the
foundations of the home are shattered, and the hopes with which it was
first built lie in ruins like a house of cards knocked down by a gust of
wind.
But why the Eighth Year? Why not the twelfth, fourteenth, or eighteenth
year? The answer is not to be found in any old superstition. There
is nothing uncanny about the number eight. The problem is not to be
shrugged off by people who despise the foolish old tradition which
clings to thirteen, and imagine this to be in the same class of folly.
By the law of averages and by undeniable statistics it has been proved
that it brings many broken-hearted men and women to the Divorce Court.
For instance, taking the annual average of divorces in England between
1904 and 1908, one finds that there were only six divorces between
husbands and wives who had been married less than a year, and only
eighteen divorces between those married less than two years. Between
the second and the fifth years the number increases to a hundred and
seventeen. Then there is a tremendous jump, and the numbers between the
fifth and tenth years are two hundred and ninety-two. The period of
the Eighth Year is the most productive of divorce. The figures are more
startling and more significant when they cover a longer period. But
apart from statistics and apart altogether from the Divorce Court,
which is only one house of trouble, by using one’s own eyes in one’s
own circle of friends one may see that young married couples who started
happily enough show signs of stress and strain as this year approaches.
The fact is undeniable. What is the cause behind the fact?
There is not one cause, there are many causes, all leading up from
the first day of marriage, inevitably, with the unswerving, relentless
fatality of Greek Tragedy to the Eighth Year. They are causes which lie
deep in the social system of our modern home life; in the little order
of things prevailing, at this time, in hundreds of thousands of small
households and small flats, inhabited by the middle-classes. It is
mainly a middle-class problem, because the rich and the poor are, for
reasons which I will show later in this argument, exempt in a large
measure from the fatality of the Eighth Year. But all the influences
at work among the middle-classes, in this strange age of intellectual
disturbance, and of blind gropings forward to new social and moral
conditions, have a close hearing upon this seeming mystery. The
economic position of this class, its social ambitions, its intellectual
adventures, its general education, its code of morality, its religion or
lack of religion, its little conventional cults, the pressure of outside
influences, thrusting inwards to the hidden life in these little
homes, bringing dangerous ideas through the front doors, or through the
keyholes, and all the mental and moral vibrations that are “in the
air” to-day, especially in the air breathed by the middle-classes,
produce--the Eighth Year.
Let us start with the first year of marriage so that we may see how the
problem works out from the beginning.
Here we have, in the first year, a young man and woman who have come
together, not through any overmastering force of passion, but as
middle-class men and women are mostly brought together, by the accidents
of juxtaposition, and by a pleasant sentiment. They met, before
marriage, at tennis parties, at suburban dances, at evening At Homes. By
the laws of natural selection, aided a little by anxious mothers, this
young man and this young woman find out, or think they find out, that
they are “suited” to each other. That is to say, the young man thrills
in a pleasant way in the presence of the girl, and she sees the timidity
in his eyes when she looks at him, and she knows that her laughter,
the touch of her hand, the little tricks and graces she has learnt from
girl-friends, or from actresses in musical comedy, or from instinct,
attract him to her. She leads him on, by absurd little tiffs, artfully
arranged, by a pretence of flirtation with other boys, by provocative
words, by moments of tenderness changing abruptly to sham indifference,
or followed by little shafts of satire which wound his pride, and sting
him into desire for her. He pursues her, not knowing that he is pursued,
so that they meet half-way. This affair makes him restless, ill at
ease. It interrupts his work and his ambitions. Presently it becomes an
obsession, and he knows that he has “fallen in love.” He makes his plans
accordingly.
In the middle-classes love still presupposes marriage (though the idea
is not so fast-rooted as in the old days), but how the dickens is he to
manage it? He is just starting his career as Something in the City, or
as a solicitor, barrister, journalist, artist, doctor. His income is
barely sufficient for himself, according to his way of life, which
includes decent clothes, a club, a game of golf when he feels like it,
a motor-cycle or a small car, a holiday abroad, theatres, a bachelor
dinner now and again--the usual thing. He belongs to the younger
generation, with wider interests, larger ideas, higher ambitions than
those with which his father and mother started life.
He could not start on their level. Times have changed. He remembers his
father’s reminiscences of early struggles, of the ceaseless anxiety to
make both ends meet, of the continual stinting and scraping to keep the
children “decent,” to provide them with a good education, to give them
a fair start in life. He remembers his mother in his own childhood. She
was always mending stockings. There was always a litter of needlework on
the dining-room table after supper.
There were times when she “did” without a maid, and exhausted herself
with domestic drudgery. There were no foreign holidays then, only a
week or two at the seaside once a year. There was precious little pocket
money for the boys. They were conscious of their shabby gentility, and
hated it.
The modern young man looks with a kind of horror upon all this domestic
squalor, as he calls it. He couldn’t stand it. If marriage means that
for him he will have none of it. But need it mean that? He and Winifred
will scheme out their lives differently. They will leave out the baby
side of the business--until they can afford to indulge in it. They will
live in a little flat, and furnish it, if necessary, on the hire system.
They will cut out the domestic drudgery. They will enjoy the fun of
life, and shelve the responsibilities until they are able to pay for
them. After all it will not be long before he is earning a good income.
He has got his feet on the first rang of the ladder, and, with a little
luck----
So he proposes to the girl, and she pretends to be immensely surprised,
though she has been eating her heart out while he hesitated, and
delayed, and pondered. They pledge each other, “till death do us part,”
and the girl, who has been reading a great many novels lately, is very
happy because her own plot is working out according to the rules of
romance.
They live in a world of romance before the marriage day. The man seems
to walk on air when he crosses London Bridge on his way to the City.
Or if he is a barrister he sees the beauty of his girl’s face in his
brief--and is in danger of losing his case. Or if a journalist he curses
his irregular hours which keep him from the little house in Tulse Hill,
or the flat in Hampstead, where there is a love-light in the windows.
He knows the outward look of the girl, her softness, her prettiness,
her shy glance when he greets her. He knows her teasing ways, her
tenderness, her vivacity. Only now and then he is startled by her
stupidity, or by her innocence, or by her ignorance, or--still more
startling--by her superior wisdom of the ways of the world, by her
shrewd little words, by a sudden revelation of knowledge about things
which girls are not supposed to know.
But these things do not count. Only sentiment and romance are allowed to
count. These two people who are about to start on the long road of life
together are utterly blind to each other’s vices or virtues. They are
deeply ignorant of each other’s soul. They know nothing of the real man
or the real woman hidden beneath the mask of social conventions, beneath
the delightful, sham of romantic affection. They know nothing of their
own souls, nor of the strength that is in them to stand the test of
life’s realities. They know nothing of their own weakness.
So they marry.
And for the first year they are wonderfully happy. For the first year is
full of excitement. They thrill to the great adventure of marriage. They
are uplifted with passionate love which seems likely to last for
ever. They have a thousand little interests. Even the trivialities
of domesticity are immensely important. Even the little disasters of
domesticity are amusing. They find a lot of laughter in life. They
laugh at the absurd mistakes of the servant-maids who follow in quick
succession. They laugh at their own ridiculous miscalculations with
regard to the expense of house-keeping. They laugh when visitors call
at awkward moments and when the dinner is spoilt by an inefficient cook.
After all, the comradeship of a young man and wife is the best thing in
life, and nothing else seems to matter. They are such good comrades that
the husband never leaves his wife a moment in his leisure time. He takes
her to the theatre with him. They spend week-ends together, far from the
madding crowd. They pluck the flowers of life, hand in hand, as lovers.
The first year merges into the second. Not yet do they know each other.