What We Should Know About Relationships Between Male and Female
When young people meet on a natural basis our present civilization insists that it must necessarily be followed by a permanent, life-long friendship or disgrace.
The cosmic urge causes a meeting which, if followed by an enforced close relationship, usually has incompatibility as a sequence. Nature has one thing forever in mind. Civilization has not counted on this. A youth and a maiden meet when passion is strong, the will undisciplined and judgment undeveloped. Convention says there is but one thing to do when young people are thus strongly attracted to each other, and that is to get the sanction of society (church and state) and make arrangements for permanent intimacy. The youth expects the perpetual beauty, smile, and charm of the ballroom, reception or parlor. The maiden expects protestation of love, and her ideal and promises fulfilled.
Each has firmly fixed in the mind an idea of something that has none or little of the real in it. An idea that is impossible. Yet in it, there are hope and fond desire somewhere hinted.
The facts are that a struggle has just begun with some of the un-poetic realities of existence, of which neither has ever before dreamed.
Perhaps the wife must rise early, prepare the breakfast, and keep the rooms in order. This is work.
The husband goes to business. Business perplexes. Oh, she is just like other women! Oh, he is just a common man! They complain.
The big urge has nothing to do with any of this. It has come and gone, perhaps. There is left a social situation. These two young people have had something in common, and possibly only a transitory something. How shall they live together when she loves what he hates, and he has hopes, ambitions, desires that are nothing to her? He has cheated me! She has fooled me! is their heart-cry.
The truth, however, is something like this: We have been deceived. Nature said one thing to us, and we confused with it something else and thought what society said was true. We have been deceived.
There was nothing in the first attraction that made these two understand anything about hardships, disagreeable duties, discomforts, weariness, pain.
People who marry without ideals entering in as part of the contract has few disappointments or troubles. If the woman expects the man simply to provide shelter, food, raiment, and the man expects a good cook, housekeeper and valet, and each fulfills his part of the expectation, there are few other demands.
Tenderness, kindness, attentions are asked for very moderately, and good service brings its own reward. Each understands the situation and has accepted this business arrangement with marriage. So there is no disappointment, no heartache. They get out of their marriage all they had expected. They are not guilty of experiment and folly. They have their quota of common sense and use it. Their ideals are simple and easily attained. Lovers who marry think more of the Ideal than of all else. And if or when the Ideal ceases to remain in the presence of the husband or the wife, then love is gone. In its place sorrow sits.
The importance of marriage is on the basis of intellectual friendship, a better business partnership, mutuality in all interests of life. But only a few people know this. We have fixed methods. Nature makes no compulsory laws in this matter of living together. But society has done that. The laws which man makes, man must enforce. What God hath joined together, no man can put asunder. And what God hath not joined together, man is not very successful in combining.
Woman have been demonetized, taking away from her the natural strength, courage, and independence that belong to the mother; and made of her a slave, under which condition she does not thrive. And neither does man thrive in being master, for the chain that holds the one is fastened to the wrist of the other.
Were it possible for men and women when they marry to realize that they own nothing more in "rights" after marriage than they did before, and would make no demands upon each other, marriage would not be a failure even with its present accepted meaning. A woman must make herself economically free, find work that exercises her body and her mind, and most of the cause of discord, unrest, and unhappiness will have disappeared.
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