UNHAPPY MARRIAGES
A good deal has already been said in these pages about the causes of
failure in marriage, but I feel that a more definite dealing with the
problem of unhappy marriages is called for.
I do not recognize any problem in those cases where marriage has not
been based upon love. When a man or a woman marries for financial
reasons, or out of a desire for a certain place in society, or because
of a mere desire to settle down in life, then he or she runs an
enormous risk, and there is nothing to be surprised at if trouble
follows. So close an intimacy as marriage involves is really only
tolerable when love constantly supplies reasons for patience,
generosity and forgiveness. In fact by marrying for any other reason
than love men and women only make the permanent and inevitable problems
of life a great deal harder to solve. And a human life does always
involve a problem either in or out of marriage. Life is a complex and
perplexing business.
But if it be true that many marriages begin with intense love and yet
after some time turn out unhappily, then a very real problem is
presented to our minds, and probably what I have already said about the
wonder of sex love, and its harmonizing influence on personalities, has
accentuated that problem for some of my readers. There are many wives
who once loved their husbands intensely, but who are now laboriously
learning to endure them. There are many husbands who felt that they had
attained to all that they longed for when they married, but who now are
almost giving up in despair the task of living even peaceably with
their wives. Many such people are heard declaring that love is
the arch deceiver of the world, and that its power only lasts during a
few short hours in the morning of life. For many the early and
wonderful days of marriage remain only as a tormenting memory, so
entirely has the color faded out of their lives. And I know that the
pain of such situations is so intense that I would fain speak of them
only with consideration and sympathy.
But none the less the broad fact has to be stated that in such cases it
is not marriage that has failed but the people involved in marriage.
There is nothing in the whole of life so beautiful or so holy but that
it can be spoilt when mishandled, and love is no exception to this. I
believe love is always felt as a call to unselfishness, but it is a
call that can be resisted. And when it is resisted and two selfish
people find themselves tied together for life, all the conditions of
misery are present. Selfish people are nearly always unhappy people,
and two unhappy people certainly cannot make a happy marriage.
And yet these generalities do not carry us very far. Unless we can
discover in further detail why marriages fail, these things were better
left unsaid. I believe, however, we can discover many of the
reasons.
To begin with, a good many unhappy husbands are idle men. Having no
hard work to which they must give themselves daily, they have to try to
find interest in life in some other way. And because there is no other
way they inevitably find themselves threatened with boredom. While
their love was new it seemed to them that it would fill life for
ever with romance and joy, but so soon as the first early stages of
marriage were past they found it failing them. Such men almost always
become moody or restless or irritable, and if they are much at home
their wives have to try to humor them through their troubles. It is
more than any woman ought to be asked to do, and more than any woman
can continuously accomplish. If such men came home in the evening
honestly tired through trying to do something worth doing they would
find their homes a delightful solace. But life's problem cannot be
solved by an idle man, whether he be married or unmarried.
And the same is true for idle wives, though there are not so many of
them. When a woman has turned over to her servants all household cares
and even the care of her children that she may run after pleasure she
has chosen to live on terms which never yet made anybody lastingly
happy. We are by nature too big for that way of life, and sooner or
later it fails to make us even content. Love will light up with a
wonderful color lives that are given to honest work, but even love
cannot make idleness other than a wearisome career. Then there are
couples who have refused to have children. If the reason be that some
possibility of disease has made it seem wrong to have children, it may
be that both will learn to adapt themselves to this limitation and to
achieve happiness in spite of it. Thousands of couples who are
childless against their own wills have learnt none the less to live
together in lasting happiness. But when childlessness is the result of
a mere selfish policy, it often revenges itself upon the couple
concerned. They have deliberately refused satisfaction to one of the
deepest instincts within them, and though they may not realize it,
those suppressed instincts destroy their harmony of being. They do not
face the fact that they have such instincts, because they could not
meet them with any adequate reason for suppressing them. They try to
deceive themselves into believing that the instincts are not there, or
they repress them from selfish causes, and life does not let them off.
Love remains unsatisfied. Its august claims have been refused. And
therefore it does not and cannot continue to bring them joy.
Another reason for unhappy marriages I have already spoken of in a
previous chapter. Sometimes they were marriages of passion and not of
love. Sometimes men and women allow themselves to be hurried into union
by the driving force of an almost impersonal thing that is purely
physical in nature, and though they think they are acting out of love,
they are leaving out the larger part of their natures. Mind and spirit
may have had no part at all in the transaction. And after such a step
there is bound to come a painful awakening. After a while he or she
will find that in the most intimate part of married life only the body
is acting, and then two people who have got very close to one another
in one respect may yet find that they are still in many ways strangers
to each other. That must always be a most critical situation. I believe
that a successful way out of it might almost always be found, if only
the two concerned would use much patience and would learn mutual
accommodation. But patience is not a universal possession either among
men or women, and often rash and foolish things are said or done at
such times which seem to break hopelessly the house of dreams which up
till then had seemed so beautiful and so permanent.
If only men and women could learn that the love which makes happy
marriages is _not_ mere passion, though it involves passion, a world of
troubles might be avoided.
The plain though unpalatable truth about a great many marriages is
that, though there was love in them at the beginning, there was not
enough of it. Often there was enough to make the man eager and
delighted to enjoy his wife when she was happy, but not enough of it to
make him able and willing to help her when she was depressed. There was
enough to make each able to take delight in the charms of the other,
but not enough to make either willing to forgive the faults in the
other, and help him or her to conquer them. There was enough for sunny
days but not enough for foggy ones--enough to produce laughter but not
enough to beget patience--enough for admiration but not enough for
understanding--enough for joy in the other's successes but not enough
for helpfulness after the other had failed. Perhaps a woman will always
seem in some ways a queer creature to a man. It is certain that no man
has always understood any woman. And I suppose a man always seems at
times a strange, childish, and primitive being to a woman, so that she
also fails to achieve understanding. But when understanding has failed
love is put to one great test. Nothing can get a couple through times
when understanding has failed, except love. But love can do it when
there is enough of it.
Nor is that the hardest thing love has to do. There come times when,
because nobody is always good, and most of us are often bad, love has
to face the plain fact of sin in the loved object. At such times to
approve is impossible, and would be a real disloyalty. To break out
into mere reproaches is futile and irritating. To do nothing is to let
a seed of separation sink into the common life. Yet the situation can
be met. It can be met by real love, because love can forgive.
Forgiveness does not mean condoning wrong. It does not mean blindness,
which is never a helpful thing. It means loving the person who has
stumbled in spite of the fact, and even perhaps just because of it. It
is at such times that one who has failed most needs love, and when
therefore love gets a supreme chance. But if a husband or a wife has
not enough love to take that chance, then marriage may fail.
And here I am not talking about exceptional cases. Whoever you are, if
you marry you are going to marry a sinner--a man or a woman who will
some day fall below his best self or her best self. And just because
you love it will bring you acute pain. You would do well to ask
yourself beforehand what you are going to do about it. And if you
cannot feel that you could forgive and go on loving all the same, you
would do well to think again. The whole story of some unhappy marriages
is told in one sentence. There was love in them, but not enough to
produce forgiveness. Yet the ultimate proof that true love is divine in
origin lies just in the fact that true love _can_ forgive.
All of which leads me on to the real reason why I write this chapter.
Marriages often fail because people often fail, and people fail
ultimately for one central reason--that they have not God in their
lives. I have read as much modern fiction as most people. And while I
have plodded through elaborately told tales of the sufferings of
married people, my amazement has grown that these tales are almost
without exception the stories of people who had no conscious relation
to God. Their authors seem to think it a most interesting thing that
such lives should go wrong, and they base upon that fact the suggestion
that life is essentially a tragic and rather disappointing matter. To
me nothing seems more inevitable and more entirely explicable than that
on such terms life should fail, and should fail alike for the married
and the unmarried. What could be more simple!
The essential greatness of man lies in the fact that he is capable of
fellowship with God. It is in realizing that fellowship that he truly
comes to himself. In nothing less than that can he ultimately find
satisfaction. The reason why all lesser experiences fail him is just
that he was made for something greater still. These lesser experiences
will carry him through the morning of life and past the usual time for
marriage. But later on the unalterable facts about his nature begin to
assert themselves. Though he does not always know it--often indeed does
not know it--he begins to need his God. And till he finds God he is
wrongly related to the whole universe. Though he will generally fight
against it a certain sadness threatens to settle on his spirit. He will
try all the old joys; and though he may pronounce them still good, a
quiet voice within will pronounce them not good enough. He cannot live
even on human love, and a disturbing force will begin to trouble him
even when he is with the wife he has loved so well. And so marriage
begins to fail.
I find the psychologists saying this with their peculiar vocabulary.
They tell us that the individual has to achieve certain adaptations if
he is to find his harmonious and balanced life. One of these is the
adaptation to society; another is the adaptation to sex, and a third is
the adaptation to the infinite. If for "adaptation to the infinite" we
put the time-honored phrase "reconciliation with God," then
psychologists and religious teachers will be found saying identically
the same thing. And all three adaptations are necessary. Adaptation
to sex alone is not enough. For those who do know God it turns out that
their human fellowship based on love becomes so entirely at one with
the divine fellowship, that the two almost cease to be felt as two and
certainly the human fellowship is enormously enriched. But where the
divine fellowship is a thing unknown a certain deep-seated weariness
and loneliness will possess the man, let his human love be never so
wonderful.
What thousands of people are demanding of the universe is that there
should be some way of solving life's problems without religion. And
life in every century has gone on demonstrating that there is no way of
solving them except through religion. I am using religion in the
largest sense, which is also the truest sense. I am not here concerned
with the dogmas of any particular church, nor with the question of the
ways in which religion shall express itself. The truth I am emphasizing
is that without some conscious relation to his God man remains a
stranger in the world and an exile from his spiritual peace; and that
such men cannot be happy or satisfying husbands. And of course all that
I have written as if thinking only of husbands is equally true for
wives.
I have been the perplexed and sympathetic confidant of a number of
people who with dismay and sorrow were finding out that marriage was
failing them. In almost all these cases religion had been simply passed
by as a thing hardly relevant to real life, and it has been plain
beyond all question that the trouble in the sphere of marriage could
not be mended till something had happened to the persons concerned--in
other words, till they had learnt to seek and use the help of God. And
often they know it for themselves. "I think what I really need is God,"
said one very troubled wife to me a few years ago. But she had begun
with a long and moving story about her marriage. She indeed went on to
ask how God can be found, and it may be that some of my readers will at
once want to ask that question, I cannot attempt to deal with it here
and now. The first great step towards finding Him is to realize that we
need Him, and so to begin to seek Him. And for the rest I can only add
that thousands upon thousands have proved in life the truth of what
Jesus claimed when He announced "I am the Way." I have written this
book largely because I have with reason and out of experience so great
a faith in the possibilities of the love that is consummated in
marriage that I would fain testify to others concerning it. But I would
none the less like to warn any man or any woman lest he or she should
imagine that by human love alone life's problem can be solved. Without
God we fail in life, and the bitterest part of the failure for many is
that even that beautiful and delicate thing marriage fails with the
rest. "We are restless till we rest in Thee," and two restless hearts
cannot be happy hearts even though they be joined together in the bonds
of love.