It is, however, very necessary for me to guard against my meaning being mistaken, in case I should be thought to be supporting the view that men are less capable than women are of unselfish love, and feel only passion. I do not understand such a distinction. Possibly it is true that affection can exist without passion, though if by “passion” sex-feeling is meant, it certainly is not true; and assuredly passion is the great and important part of love—nay, rather, it is Love itself.
The truth is this: Women have been taught for generations to look on love from a standpoint of unreality, and when in marriage they are forced to face some great fact in life, they are shocked and disillusioned. It is useless for women to go on acting as if sex desire was something of which nice people ought to be ashamed. Marriage is really a contract in which the woman undertakes certain sexual duties as well as the man, and the woman has the advantage, for she possesses all that the man most wants.
We may not safely ask too much or too little from marriage or take too high or too low a view of it. But the Christian view of the nature of marriage is at once too materialistic and too ascetic. The ancient world looked on marriage as a religious duty. “To be mothers were women created, and to be fathers men.” Christianity permitted marriage, but only as a necessary evil against the temptations of lust. “It is better to marry than to burn.”
This is, of course, a long past story. But such hateful view of marriage has left in every Christian land an inheritance of evil. The sexual life was considered impure and a concession to the lower nature in man; true purity of life was to be attained only in celibacy. Small wonder that marriage, thus regarded as an escape from worse evil and a cover to laxity of sexual conduct, is often so immoral. We see at once that the main evil of this gross misunderstanding of love must have fallen upon women. The woman was there just to keep the man in condition and from sin. I can hardly over-estimate the disastrous consequences both to marriage and to women of this unholy view of the sexual relationship.
The false glorification of asceticism, which denies the true nature of marriage while at the same time professedly regarding marriage as a sacrament, has involved a corresponding and unhealthy classifying of love into higher and lower, the spiritual and the physical; and the action of this double standard in the sexual life has led, on the one side, to the setting up of a theoretical ideal of conduct which, as few are able to follow it, tends to become an empty form, and this, on the other side, has led to a hidden laxity, within marriage and outside it.