Marriage-a Selective Process

I

SHE fell into his arms. He kissed her passionately. They were married in the following June. And they lived happily ever afterward. So ends the novel of yesteryear. After inane misunderstandings and hectic reconciliations, an ecstatic emotion is discovered, which the author and his characters call love. A selfish man and a highly imaginative and emotional girl marry, and we are told to believe that, fed upon that emotion, they lived happily ever afterward.

We have thought of their living happily ever afterward with kindly amusement. It was a pleasing exaggeration. But it was well to keep the ideal before the young. They would be disillusioned soon enough. So we have reasoned. But it was not a harmless exaggeration. It was one of the most dreadful lies that ever passed current among the children of men. Unconsciously, we have taken the philosophy of the novel in relation to marriage into our serious thinking, and it has become incorporated into our very language. We look for ‘happy’ marriages. We inquire as to the married, whether or no are they ‘happy.’

That the hero and heroine of the story lived happily ever afterward is a double lie. It is false in its statement and it is false in its assumption. The bride and groom did not live happily ever afterward. The ecstasy of the emotion passed away. It was followed by a much-paraded show of affection. During the period of the novel, both had developed a taste for inane misunderstanding, to be followed by hectic reconciliations. The bride, after a little, as she concocted the family meals, began to concoct family misunderstandings. The reconciliations did not work as well after marriage as they had before the engagement. But both husband and wife had acquired a taste for the dramatic. The lure of the dramatic led by devious courses, naturally and unfailingly, to the final drama in the divorce court. That is how the marriage of the novel ended in real life.

On the other hand, who ever said that, of right, these two should be happy? What ordinance of a good God ever directed that the married should be happy and the unmarried should be unhappy? What has mere happiness, or what have fortuitous happenings, to do with the success of marriage?

Marriage opens the door to a full life. It more than doubles the scope and play of experience, but it more than doubles the possibility of utter misery. But all questions of happiness and misery are quite beside the point. Can a mother who has borne a child, can parents who have experienced all the vicarious joys and agonies attendant upon parenthood, consider the relative happiness and unhappiness that those experiences entail? Marriage is fife at its full, and brings in its train untold suffering and heartracking responsibility. Every father and every mother knows these things; yet, when we turn back to consider an engagement or a wedding, we pick up the flippant word and flippant thought of godless fiction and discuss ‘happy’ marriages.

Divorce is only the symptom of the disease that corrupts our marriages. Yet we have volumes written of homœopathic discussion of the symptom and very little allopathic investigation of the disease. In the discussion of the divorce evil, great confusion occurs; for just as one begins to discuss divorce as an evil, one is forced to the conclusion that divorce is a great boon. It is hardly more fair to discuss the evils of divorce than it would be to discuss the evils of surgery. It is the tumor in the marriage, not the surgery of the divorce, which is the evil that needs our painstaking study.

Law, as the crystallization of public opinion, is of necessity always a few strides behind advanced public opinion and whole stretches behind the most intelligent thought of the age. Nevertheless, in a survey of marriage as it exists to-day, it is important to note the point at which the civil courts have arrived.

When, several centuries ago, the courts broke away from the dominance of the Church, the English jurists, with a great show of intellectual independence, announced: ‘Our law considers marriage in no other light than as a civil contract.’ It was a contract sui juris, indeed, differing from every other known kind of contract in almost every possible respect. The American courts adopted the thought and language of the English lawyers, and judges for centuries insisted upon this definition. Then, about thirty years ago, there came a complete reversal. Marriage, it was discovered, was no mere contract, but ‘a status arising out of a contract.’ So the law remains to-day. Words, words, words!

The clerical view of the matter is even less helpful than the legal. St. Paul, an old bachelor himself, living in a corrupt age, admitting with great frankness that he was expressing only his own personal opinion, argued that it was better not to marry at all, but that, if it were necessary for one to marry, it was lawful for a Christian to do so. Upon this absurd basis, the Church built the notion, first of the sacrament of matrimony and later, of the holy ordinance of matrimony.

No doubt marriage is a status. It may be a sacrament, and undoubtedly it is a holy ordinance. But it is a holy ordinance that owes its origin, not to the dicta of any celibate saint, nor to the dogma of any holy church. It rests upon the mandate of the ‘God of things as they are.’ It is the product of the divine in man — the unselfish best. And it is that unselfish best within him that teaches him to exercise his noblest instinct with selfrestraint, and to provide for children and the future of the race in the wisest manner he can devise.

One cannot pass by in silence that school of philosophy which seeks to explain all our institutions as products of economic influences. Sometimes its theory is known as Economic Determinism, sometimes as the Materialistic Explanation of Society. Socialists, especially novices in Socialism, frequently have radical views on the subject of marriage and divorce. But it is hardly accurate to denote the view under discussion in this paragraph as the Socialist view. Socialists, however, often claim that the Revolution, which they predict with so much assurance, will end the institution of marriage as it is now known.

In the April, 1923, number of the Atlantic, Dean Inge, in discussing ‘Catholic Church and Anglo-Saxon Mind,’assumes that ‘private property cannot be successfully attacked without destroying the monogamous family.'

If the monogamous family cannot survive the present social economic order, it is hard to escape the corollary that marriage is a mere product of the present social system. If that be so, its sacramental garb would seem to drop away. But we cannot admit that marriage and the monogamous family would not survive the triumph of Socialism and the passing of private property.

One might be willing to go a long way with the doctrines of this school of thought. One might admit that our courts express the view of the moneyed class; that big business sways our legislatures; that the capitalists dictate the nomination of candidates for the presidency; that the Constitution of the United States was ‘put over’ by the moneyed interests of those days — yes, that the Puritan Fathers were interested in cod-fishing as well as in civil and religious liberty. But marriage is based on instincts as fundamental as those which sway courts, or create constitutions or colonies. ‘Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.’ The political bosses attempt some very daring things, but the wise ones, except in great emergency, never attempt to put forward as a candidate for office a notorious offender against the marriage relationship. No bank will continue as its president a man whose marital affairs become a matter of too great public concern. No! Hymen still triumphs over Mammon.

We are told of the male ape with a club resting at the foot of the tree while his mate and their offspring sleep in the tree. The property of the ape in club and tree is the product of the marriage status. She is not his wife because he has a club and a tree, but the club and tree are recognized as his property because he has a wife and family.

So one may safely venture the opinion that private property and the capitalistic system are rather the outgrowth of marriage than that marriage is the outgrowth of capitalism and an incident of private property.

II

At Dartmouth, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, Professor Wells gave a short course in sociology. It was based upon a study of the census and of insurance statistics. One formula was so fundamental that it either answered every question or, failing that, served to convince Professor Wells that the student uttering it had a general understanding of the subject, sufficient to entitle him to a credit for his recitation. That formula was this: ‘Marriage is a selective process.’ Married men lived longer, made more money, had more children, held more political offices — because, forsooth, marriage is a selective process.

Twenty-five years of experience with broken marriages, as a lawyer and as referee in divorce cases, have led me to the conviction that Professor Wells’s characterization of marriage is fundamental. That marriage is one of the evolutionary processes of nature is more significant than that it bears relationship to the economic order, or that it is a holy ordinance, or that it is a status based on a civil contract.

Everything connected with the evolutionary theory must be stated and restated with great caution. Survival of the fittest, of course, means not survival of the best. A selective process selects those best adapted to its own purposes, if we can attribute purpose to an impersonal process. Generally speaking, the halt, the lame, and the blind are less likely to marry than those not so handicapped. Yet it often happens that one physically handicapped has qualities of the mind which so far outweigh the mere physical handicap that the possessor is more fit than his perfectly formed brother. Among women, the first thought that strikes one is that beauty and popularity lead to marriage. Yet it frequently happens that the girl who is both beautiful and popular thereby develops a hypercritical state of mind which renders her incapable of a decision that is necessary, and she remains unmarried. But in those cases it is the operation of the law of selection that is at work. For it is the power to overcome his handicap that renders the man fit for marriage, and it is the lack of decision in the popular beauty that renders her unfit.

In the normal wedding, where boy and girl ripen to manhood and womanhood, we see and are glad to recognize the operation of a great universal kindly law of nature, and the bride we vaunt as ‘the beauty, the pride of our dwelling.’ But marriage, as a selective process, has a far sterner aspect as the stress of life begins to bear more heavily upon the newly married. For marriage, as a selective process, means not only that the more fit marry, but also that only the fittest survive the strains and stress of married life. Full normal marriages are followed by parenthood. Marriage entails responsibility; parenthood brings further burdens; and, as the children increase in number and in age, the responsibility becomes greater and the burden becomes more severe.

Marriage, which begins as a selective process, continues as a selective process. If it has been entered upon lightly and inadvisedly, the strain becomes too severe and husband or wife falls by the wayside.

One might safely venture the opinion that in no country, at no time in the history of mankind, has there been a greater regard for personal chastity among young men than during the last twenty years in America. Yet, during those same years, the sense of responsibility for the obligations of the marriage relationship has been very lightly felt. The great increase of divorce has not been due to any marked increase of sexual immorality, but rather to a growing lack of sense of responsibility toward the marriage status. Men and girls have rushed into marriage because they were in love. Was not that reason enough, forsooth? They have been divorced because they were out of love. Was not that reason enough too, forsooth? ‘What,’ said their elders, ‘could be more dreadful than a loveless marriage?'

The following is from the pen of a distinguished clergyman, published in the pages of the Atlantic: —

‘Where love is, there marriage is; where love is not, marriage has ceased to be. For marriage to go on when love is dead puts before us a situation which, if described for what it is, would require the use of words that cut like whips of fire.'

These words are symptomatic of the disease that has corrupted our ideas of what marriage is and properly should be. Notwithstanding this dramatic dictum, it seems obvious that the continuance of the most fundamental of our human relationships, that of husband and wife, cannot safely be made to depend upon the continuance or cessation of an emotion. Society and the children of the marriage would seem to have some rights less ephemeral than the mere existence of an emotional state of mind in the parents.

When it is recognized that marriage is life at its full, and both a product and an operating agency of natural selection, it is easy to understand that in every age it will suffer from all the ills that attend upon life itself, and it will suffer too from the pain that is attendant upon the operation of all processes of natural selection. And in each age it will suffer from those ills that are the peculiar heritage of that age.

The causes, therefore, of the extraordinary prevalence of divorce in America at this time are to be found in those evils peculiar to our contemporaneous life. To name some of them is sufficient. The accentuation of competition, the increase of luxury, the higher cost of living, the speedingup of life, the relaxation of conventional standards of conduct on the part of women, the over-insistence of woman upon her rights, have all borne their toll of unsuccessful marriages. But beyond all, and often coupled with the others, has been the disappointment that both parties have felt that their marriage has not proved ‘happy.’ They had been led to believe that their marriage would be happy, not by reason of any courage, self-control, or self-sacrifice on their part, but because of the fortuitous circumstance that they were married.

One would not rob love-making of any of its romance, its poetry, or its passion. But it were well for lovers to know that marriage is a stern challenge to their manhood and womanhood at every point, and that its success or failure will not depend upon any lucky chance or favorable happening.

If marriage is not based upon selfsacrifice, it is foredoomed to essential failure. In a successful marriage, only the children have rights worthy of consideration. In the lawyer’s office, the wife’s rights or the husband’s rights may be discussed, but when the lawyer’s office has been reached the success of the marriage has been sadly shaken. True marriage can never be a mere partnership for mutual benefit. Enlightened selfishness has in marriage no proper place. The profoundest philosophic truth — that he who loseth his life shall find it — has no better exemplification than in the estate of marriage.

It is an amazing way that the Creator, through the operation of his selective processes, has taken to provide for the continuance of the species, to link together a man with a man’s emotional nature and a woman with a strikingly different emotional nature. It would seem apparent that such a union of necessity would increase both the joy and pain of life fourfold. Perhaps, forsooth, He is not interested that the lovers should live happily ever afterward. Possibly marriage is a holy ordinance that man and woman shall find their fullest expression in a life of sacrifice for others. But, be that as it may, marriage seems still to excite the imagination of all the sons and daughters of Eve. Children prate of it; old men totter into it; youth wastes its spare time on its preliminaries; and the wedding-day is the crowning day of young life. Mothers scheme for it for their children. Society finds it necessary to fix a more or less variable limit upon the time after which a bereaved spouse decently may return with another to the married state; and the divorced rush back into marriage as speedily as the orderly processes of the law will permit. Marriage — with all its faults, we love it still. It is not only the most fundamental, but also by far the most popular, of our institutions.