Take a very common instance of this agonizing incompatibility. A widow
brings up her son to manhood. He meets a strange woman, and goes off
with and marries her, leaving his mother desolate. It does not occur to
him that this is at all hard on her: he does it as a matter of course,
and actually expects his mother to receive, on terms of special
affection, the woman for whom she has been abandoned. If he shewed any
sense of what he was doing, any remorse; if he mingled his tears with
hers and asked her not to think too hardly of him because he had obeyed
the inevitable destiny of a man to leave his father and mother and
cleave to his wife, she could give him her blessing and accept her
bereavement with dignity and without reproach. But the man never dreams
of such considerations. To him his mother's feeling in the matter, when
she betrays it, is unreasonable, ridiculous, and even odious, as shewing
a prejudice against his adorable bride.
I have taken the widow as an extreme and obvious case; but there are
many husbands and wives who are tired of their consorts, or disappointed
in them, or estranged from them by infidelities; and these parents, in
losing a son or a daughter through marriage, may be losing everything
they care for. No parent's love is as innocent as the love of a child:
the exclusion of all conscious sexual feeling from it does not exclude
the bitterness, jealousy, and despair at loss which characterize sexual
passion: in fact, what is called a pure love may easily be more selfish
and jealous than a carnal one. Anyhow, it is plain matter of fact that
naively selfish people sometimes try with fierce jealousy to prevent
their children marrying.