But the matter is not so simple as these reformers seem to believe. And I doubt if any outward change is really capable of producing the prompt kind of penny-in-the-slot results that its supporters claim that it can. The complexity of marriage, in particular, the occurrence of sexual disharmonies so present and active for misery to-day, are ignored by all intellectual reformers. It is because they have no emotional hold of life as a whole that they find it easy to squeeze all life into their magic theories. For myself I can see no sure remedy: and were I asked to state one, I could say only: “A few thousand years more of development: a growth towards consciousness and a fuller understanding of the meaning of life.”
Marriage is not a matter of abstract principles: it will always be difficult. If it is anything that can be stated, it is a social practice, preserving unity and order amongst those who find these qualities of service in the art of living. We should humble ourselves to accept the lessons of life, then we should be more careful of simple human needs.
A very slight knowledge of existing marriages is sufficient to convince even the most optimistic believer that true mating is hard. I do not believe that most marriages are unhappy, but I do know that only the very few are happy. With many partners, and even those who are passionate lovers, the attraction of sex always seems to fall short of its end; it draws the two together in a momentary self-forgetfulness, but for the rest it seems rather to widen their separateness; they are secret to one another in everything, united only in the sexual embrace.
And the man who has not found his way already to the soul of a woman by some other means, will not do so through the channels of sex. For a woman wants to be loved for what she is, not for what the man wants from her. And for this reason those men who have in them no faculty for friendship will be likely always to meet with coldness on the part of their wives in response to their continued ardour. Such men do not understand that despite all their sexual proneness they are psychologically impotent.
The word love is used in so general and indiscriminate a way to denote sometimes the most transitory impulse, and sometimes the most intimate and profound feeling, that a mass of misunderstanding arises. Love comes from the senses as well as from the soul, and the one emotion often is mistaken for the other. And what this serves to bring home to us is the dualism inherent in the marriages of a civilised age, in which the element of sexual masterfulness, being a natural expression of masculinity, is unintentionally active, a survival of very primitive instincts, which to-day struggle for mastery with newer emotions and sympathy, flaring up in a late expression to justify the need for sexual contrast.