Marriage has not escaped the general disturbances of the past five
years. The causes are many and obvious. Man is generally guided, not
directly by the automatic instincts, working through the lower nerve
centers, but rather by ideas acting in the higher nerve centers of his
brain. Instincts with him are not instinctive, but are checked and
supervised by intelligence. Only when a great shock, a sudden fear or
joy, occurs does the instinctive working replace the consciously planned
action: the man or the woman find themselves speaking in an unaccustomed
voice, saying what they did not know they would say; doing unaccustomed
things, which they had never intended to do, sometimes they lose control
of their body--they rage, their speech descends to inarticulate cries.
Then the old system of instinctive response to the outer world, which
generally is inactive and so imperceptibly becomes disused, becomes by
the sudden generation of excessive emotion stocked with energy, so that
it exceeds in power the energy of which the intelligence makes use.
Impulses leap into being, and very often there is a sudden response to
adventure and more primitive actions.
This is what the War did in many departments of life. Normal control,
conventional standards, old careful habits of conduct, were broken
through at a time of excessive emotionalism. The many hasty marriages
were a sign of the nervous condition of the times. The customary
criticisms of reason were not heard, or not until the emotional storm
had subsided. This is, of course, a condition not infrequent in
marriage; but now it was exaggerated; such marriages may not,
unfortunately, bear the scrutiny of minds restored to sobriety.
We have called these war marriages real romances. But are they? What
does the husband know of the girl he has taken to be one with his own
flesh? What does she know of him? Never have they had one real talk,
never stood the test of a quarrel, never passed unexciting days with one
another.
I want to labor that point. The most frequent causes of trouble in
marriage are born of the daily fret of common living, of minor habits,
of omissions and stupidities. Romantics may protest, but what most
strains and tears our love are just trifles, so insignificant that
rarely is their adverse action even noticed.
The safe and right consideration in any relationship that is to last
into marriage is not only--are our persons agreeable to each other? But,
can we live together and continue to love one another? It needs a lot of
grit and a lot of duty to keep in love with daily life. But war turned
men into heroes, while women thought the war was going to be so fine
they could do anything to help; they wanted their share, each one to
have a stake for herself, and the easiest way to gain this was the
ownership of a soldier-lover. It prevented the feeling of "being left
out." A new friendliness sprang up between the sexes. Advances were
made, perfectly natural, but quite unusual; and the men in khaki and in
blue found themselves diligently pursued, and it must be owned they
liked it.
Thus many men have taken girls for wives who are everything they don't
want their wives to be. There is no fitness of disposition and
character, no unity of ideals, no passionate surrender of the Self in
devotion, no fixed purpose of duty, no harmony in tastes or outlook.
Such love must come to disaster; it is like a damp squib, it is never
properly alight and fades out swiftly in noisy splutters. Then, when the
first desire goes, no friend but an enemy is discovered.
A man falls in love very readily, and girls have used, quite
unconsciously sometimes, very consciously in some cases, the man's
undisciplined impulses for his own subjection. I need not recall
incidents that all among us must have witnessed. I do not wish to pass
any censure upon women. The sensualist within most of us is stronger
than we women admit, and the primitive fact forces us to take risks,
sending us headlong into a thousand dangers.