"American Medicine" commenting upon the fact that divorces have increased twenty per cent in eight years and that, if the rate of increase continues, there will be as many divorces as marriages in thirty years from now, reaches the conclusion that "the individual has moved on far in the past two thousand years, while the institution of marriage has remained unaltered through the centuries.... The basis of marriage as it was originally conceived was entirely a racial one in which the individual counted for little; it was meant as a means of building a family and conserving it. Nothing else counted and the primitive individual exacted little else.... The modern man and woman demands in his mate more than that and it is here that the marriage institution is most defective in that it does not yield to these greater demands." Polygamy and polyandry have been found wanting and have been abandoned. Monogamy is, at the[Pg 96] present day, tempered by frequent infidelity and numerous divorces. Which means that it does not satisfy the needs of the human race. Shall free love offer a solution?
Man the Dissatisfied. I might as well voice here my pessimistic belief that there is no permanent solution for any human problems. The only tangible difference between man and the animals is that the animals are satisfied and man everlastingly dissatisfied. No cat was ever dissatisfied enough with the primitive feline way of catching mice to invent a mouse trap.
The animals solved their problems thousands of years ago. Unless domesticated and exposed to the exclusive influence of men, they never vary from the form of behavior of their particular species.
The only problem they have been unable to solve is how to get rid of man, the invader and parasite, and they will never cope with it.
Man's satisfaction with every new improvement is only temporary.
The Next Step. Free love may be the next step in the evolution of the sexual partnership but it certainly will not be the solution of the marriage problem.
As far as the mates themselves are concerned,[Pg 97] free love will only be a success in the case of extremely normal individuals for whom the sexual relationship means solely physical gratification. As soon as affection intervenes in those unions, the thousand forms of jealousy we shall describe in another chapter will enter into play.
Jealousy among free lovers cannot but rage more fiercely than among the legally married. A thousand details of married life are simply meant to establish the mates' ownership of each other in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world. The number of war marriages contracted hastily during the great European conflict by young men and women on the eve of the bridegroom's departure for Europe testifies to the powerful "safety" symbolism of the marriage ceremony.
A gullible young man in love with a girl would not have trusted her alone during his absence from home. She might have experienced a change of heart. After going thru a wedding ceremony with him, however, he knew that she could not change her mind and love another. As a matter of fact most of those unions were disastrous. A virgin might have waited. A young woman left alone after a few days of erotic enjoyment was naturally an easy prey for any clever tempter. The bride[Pg 98]groom, on the other hand, went away blissfully, secure in the thought that the marriage certificate, the ceremony, the wedding ring, the transformation of Mary Brown into Mrs. John Smith would protect his "honor" while he was away.
Blissful Blindness. Some of the cleverest, most cynically suspicious husbands and wives go thru life blissfully blind to their mate's sidesteps. They see thru anyone else's husband or wife but they seldom suspect their husband or their wife. The stress which they place on the possessive works in their case as the fetish which a savage takes into battle. In hoc signo vinces.
It is only in the so called smart set that men and women allude to their mates by their first names. The working classes, sexually the most conservative and puritanical, use the expressions "my man" or "the missus"; middle class men and women pompously refer to their mates as Mr. Smith or Mrs. Smith, always reminding their hearers of the legitimacy of their union. The celebration of wooden weddings, silver weddings, etc., is a means of reminding the community that Mr. and Mrs. John Smith own each other, just as the engagement diamond is a scarecrow proportionate in visibility to the prospective bridegroom's fortune.
[Pg 99]
Even if free love unions became the adopted standard of the land, those unions would be celebrated with appropriate ritual, the aim of which would be to tie the man to the woman and the woman to the man and to warn away sexual hunters of both sexes.
Free love will not be possible until the absolute equality of men and women has been accepted, not only theor............