IS FREE LOVE POSSIBLE?
"American Medicine" commenting upon the fact that divorces have
increased twenty per cent in eight years and that, if the rate of
increase continues, there will be as many divorces as marriages in
thirty years from now, reaches the conclusion that "the individual has
moved on far in the past two thousand years, while the institution of
marriage has remained unaltered through the centuries.... The basis
of marriage as it was originally conceived was entirely a racial one
in which the individual counted for little; it was meant as a means
of building a family and conserving it. Nothing else counted and the
primitive individual exacted little else.... The modern man and woman
demands in his mate more than that and it is here that the marriage
institution is most defective in that it does not yield to these
greater demands."
Polygamy and polyandry have been found wanting and have been abandoned.
Monogamy is, at the present day, tempered by frequent infidelity and
numerous divorces. Which means that it does not satisfy the needs of
the human race. Shall free love offer a solution?
=Man the Dissatisfied.= I might as well voice here my pessimistic
belief that there is no permanent solution for any human problems.
The only tangible difference between man and the animals is that the
animals are satisfied and man everlastingly dissatisfied. No cat was
ever dissatisfied enough with the primitive feline way of catching mice
to invent a mouse trap.
The animals solved their problems thousands of years ago. Unless
domesticated and exposed to the exclusive influence of men, they never
vary from the form of behavior of their particular species.
The only problem they have been unable to solve is how to get rid of
man, the invader and parasite, and they will never cope with it.
Man's satisfaction with every new improvement is only temporary.
=The Next Step.= Free love may be the next step in the evolution
of the sexual partnership but it certainly will not be _the_ solution
of the marriage problem.
As far as the mates themselves are concerned, free love will only be a
success in the case of extremely normal individuals for whom the sexual
relationship means solely physical gratification. As soon as affection
intervenes in those unions, the thousand forms of jealousy we shall
describe in another chapter will enter into play.
Jealousy among free lovers cannot but rage more fiercely than among the
legally married. A thousand details of married life are simply meant to
establish the mates' ownership of each other in their own eyes and in
the eyes of the world. The number of war marriages contracted hastily
during the great European conflict by young men and women on the eve
of the bridegroom's departure for Europe testifies to the powerful
"safety" symbolism of the marriage ceremony.
A gullible young man in love with a girl would not have trusted her
alone during his absence from home. She might have experienced a change
of heart. After going thru a wedding ceremony with him, however, he
_knew_ that she could not change her mind and love another. As a matter
of fact most of those unions were disastrous. A virgin might have
waited. A young woman left alone after a few days of erotic enjoyment
was naturally an easy prey for any clever tempter. The bridegroom,
on the other hand, went away blissfully, secure in the thought
that the marriage certificate, the ceremony, the wedding ring, the
transformation of Mary Brown into Mrs. John Smith would protect his
"honor" while he was away.
=Blissful Blindness.= Some of the cleverest, most cynically suspicious
husbands and wives go thru life blissfully blind to their mate's
sidesteps. They see thru anyone else's husband or wife but they seldom
suspect _their_ husband or _their_ wife. The stress which they place on
the possessive works in their case as the fetish which a savage takes
into battle. In hoc signo vinces.
It is only in the so called smart set that men and women allude to
their mates by their first names. The working classes, sexually the
most conservative and puritanical, use the expressions "my man" or "the
missus"; middle class men and women pompously refer to their mates
as Mr. Smith or Mrs. Smith, always reminding their hearers of the
legitimacy of their union. The celebration of wooden weddings, silver
weddings, etc., is a means of reminding the community that Mr. and
Mrs. John Smith _own_ each other, just as the engagement diamond is a
scarecrow proportionate in visibility to the prospective bridegroom's
fortune.
Even if free love unions became the adopted standard of the land, those
unions would be celebrated with appropriate ritual, the aim of which
would be to tie the man to the woman and the woman to the man and to
warn away sexual hunters of both sexes.
Free love will not be possible until the absolute equality of men and
women has been accepted, not only theoretically but practically.
Before that equality is a fact, there must be written into the
statute books some form of financial assistance to the woman disabled
by pregnancy and lactation and which will enable her to retain her
independence regardless of her physiological condition.
Even this will not be enough. Birth control measures will have to
become lawful and the subject of careful scientific teaching before
woman can hope to lead her life unenslaved to her children's father.
=What of the Child?= Besides, in free love arrangements, the mates
are not the only parties to be considered. There is a party of the
third part: the children, if any.
If a perfectly independent male decides to cohabit for an indefinite
period of time with a perfectly independent female, the community can
hardly interpose any objection. For after all, most of our ethical
indignation at the thought of temporary unions is due to the miserly
fear of the community lest a pregnant woman and fatherless children
be thrown upon it for support. No one's rights would be trespassed
upon by such arrangements, ephemeral as they might be. As they would
not cost anyone any money they would be considered acceptable. When
a self supporting Sarah Bernhardt or Isadora Duncan bears children
out of wedlock and we run no risk of being taxed for the support of
her "illegitimate" progeny, we assume more liberal views than we
would should a stenographer or a switchboard operator commit the same
"errors."
When children are the outcome of any form of union, however, the
psychoanalyst, broad as he may be, is compelled to remember the pitiful
stories he has heard in his office. No neurotic ever had a pleasant
childhood. No neurotic was the child of a father and mother united
by real love and manifesting within the family circle the mutual
tenderness which is the poetry or the music of the home.
=Disharmony Between the Parents=, culminating in divorce or
desertion, has wrecked the future of thousands of children. Not every
unhappy home has produced neurotics, but, every neurotic is the
product of undesirable home conditions.
Furthermore, it seems as tho a child in order to reach normal
adulthood should be brought up by both a male and female. Many male
homosexuals I have observed were brought up by a widowed mother or a
woman abandoned by her husband or lover. In other cases, impotence or
frigidity affected respectively boys and girls who had lost the parent
of the same sex. Many other disturbances of the mental life, due to
incompleteness of the parental environment or to its imperfection,
could be mentioned if the limits of this book would permit.
From the point of view of psychiatry, there is only one answer to be
given to the question if free love is acceptable. Free love _must_
be supplemented by birth control. Those free lovers who decide to
procreate children must also agree to live together until the youngest
of their offspring has reached at least its fifteenth year.
Creating children with the intention of turning them over to some
charitable institution is also a proposition which to a student of
mental disturbances appears just short of criminal.
=The Institution Child.= Few children thrive well mentally or
physically under institutional treatment.
Children need love in order to grow strong mentally or physically. I
read somewhere a story to the effect that a mediaeval ruler directed
that some children be brought up by nurses who would never show them
the slightest sign of affection or interest, his aim being, if my
memory serves me well, to make extremely virile fighters out of those
children, by protecting them against any weakening influence.
As the story goes, all the children died.
I do not vouch for the authenticity of the story but the vital
statistics of orphan asylums affirm its plausibility. Children fare
better in a poor, unsanitary home, at the hands of a stupid and
ignorant but affectionate mother than in an up to date, well appointed,
sanitary asylum. They need, in order to develop a strong, serviceable,
well balanced autonomic nervous system, the safety which emanates from
the breasts, the kisses, the hands, the admiring glances of their
mother.
If no doting mother has ever told a child that he is wonderful and the
most precious thing on earth, he will never quite consider himself as
of much avail and will probably never become wonderful in any respect.
=Free Love Plus Birth Control= may reduce the actual population of the
earth, but when only real lovers deeply attached to each other and only
bound to each other by sexual desire and intellectual regard, will live
together and decide to rear children as a monument to their love, free
love and birth control will cause the population of insane asylums to
dwindle to nothing and will save the world from the thousands of morons
and neurotics who are the products of married disharmony and married
slavery.