The Open Door in Marriage

THE following letter was written to a younger friend. Under the proper disguises, I am willing that it should be published, because I believe that women who hold my opinions should not leave the printed word entirely to those who preach the ‘open door’ in marriage.

DEAR MARGARET : —
Surely you do not mind my knowing what you are planning to do with your life and the life of Kenneth and the children; and surely, even if you would prefer to shut me out in spite of the very close bonds that have existed between us, you will concede to your husband the right to have come to me in his trouble. To no one else could he give his confidence in the same way. He could assume on my part an old and deep affection for you, a predilection for understanding and sympathizing with you.
I am going to write you exactly what I think. I do not expect to change your decision. But some day you will have to look upon your present act in retrospect. Once, when I was young and going through a difficult experience, I suddenly realized that 1 should have to live the rest of my life with the sort of person I was then allowing myself to be. So I invented an epigram, and wrote it out and pinned it up on my desk, where I could see it every day. It read: ‘Look upon your present as the past of your future.’ The day will come, Madge, when this present will be your past, and looking back upon it from the vantage point of its consequences, you will say to yourself, either, ‘ My best friend was wrong,’ or ‘My best friend was right.’ I am not going to make it possible for you to say, ‘My best friend expressed no opinion — why was she silent? ’
First, I am going to write out the situation as I understand it. I want you to know the basis on which I speak. You married Kenneth in the belief that you loved him, and your first four years of life with him, during which your two children were born, were sufficiently happy ones. Then you came again in contact, with Eugene, who had loved you before your marriage. You have found that you love him a great deal more than you love Kenneth. You thoroughly respect and like Kenneth, and you appreciate the value of his sturdy character and his honest and capable devotion to work. You really do enjoy being with him, but the glory — if there ever was a glory — of this love has passed away. It is your love for Eugene which now sweeps you on like a great tide, which lifts you to the stars, which vibrates with the immortal music of the universe, which is the holiest and purest thing you have ever known. You feel, in loving him, the white ecstasy of the saint.
All this, of course, Kenneth has not told me. I gather it only from his simple and restrained, ‘She loves him.’ But you see, dear child, certain things are common to the various forms of love. Nobody has to overhear young lovers of twenty, to know what they are talking about under their first moon; and nobody needs to be told how a woman of thirty-five describes to herself the love she feels for the man who supplants her good, but rather house-worn, husband. You are sharing an experience that has always been very common. It is even commonplace. But that does not mean that to you it is any the less real. I do, indeed, appreciate the fact that you are experiencing a very powerful emotion.
But to go back to the situation. You feel that you must leave Kenneth and go to Eugene; but you love your children also and mean to take them with you. You ask Kenneth to give them up to you entirely. Your first plan was to go to Eugene without waiting for a divorce; but you now think it more ‘expedient’ to legalize the relation from the beginning, and so you are going to wait for the process of the law.
Kenneth’s attitude toward you is one of chivalric unselfishness. He will arrange for a divorce and be content with occasional visits from his children. He wants only your happiness. He fears for your future more profoundly than he sorrows for his own. He has begged you to remain with him on terms of friendship and freedom. In staying with him, you would not have to sacrifice any self-respect. You could preserve your economic independence and your personal liberty. You yourself see clearly that you have nothing to run away from or to escape from, but are choosing rather to go toward something and to seize something for yourself. This is the situation, is it not?
Now, for my own point of view. You have, evidently, not come to me yourself because you know that I would advise you to give up Eugene. I am going to try to think out what reasons I can give that would make any appeal to you. Of course, I am not going to offer ‘social conventions’ or ‘religious dogmas.’ The modern term for these, I understand, is ‘taboos.’ By this word your contemporaries seek amusingly to relegate to the rank of savages those who believe in such conventions and dogmas. However, in the sense in which you understand them, I don’t care much for them, either. Naturally, with my interest in history, I have more sympathy than you have with their symbolic value, knowing that they represent props upon which men and women have relied in the never-ending struggle for civilization. But I am more than willing to set them all aside here. Certainly they would never be my own ultimate guides in periods of storm or stress.
I should myself wish to rise into the æther where the ‘Laws on high’ abide. You remember the magnificent description of them by Sophocles — ‘No mortal nature among men gave birth to them, nor ever shall oblivion lull them to slumber. Great is God within them, and He grows not old.’ But I catch myself on the last phrase. I know that, quite aside from ‘religious dogmas,’ you have no religion in the richest significance of the term — in the significance dear to Socrates, or Marcus Aurelius, or Paul. My favorite definition of religion is the glowing phrase hurled to us from the trenches during the Great War: — ‘It is betting your life on the existence of God.’ However you define God, He is the Thing bigger than your own life. You now are betting your life on the nonexistence of forces and necessities greater than your own desires. This knowledge of you makes it impossible for me to suggest to you the two appeals that would summon my own will. I do not allude to myself lightly, Madge. You must realize that, like all men and women, I, too, have met moral crises in the course of years of living.
I cannot, for example, mention Duty to you. The very word turns you cold and stony. It chills me also as the voice of ‘Puritans’; but as the ‘daughter of the voice of God,’ it has often come to me warm and tender, inspiriting and impelling. Over and over it has calmed within me the struggle of frail humanity. Over and over — for one rushes to the poets for figures — I have found that all the stubborn thistles along the way do indeed burst

You look with contempt at a straight and narrow way bristling with thistles. You are like so many of a still younger generation. One of them said lately, ‘Yes, I acknowledge it is my duty; but, you see, the word means absolutely nothing to me.’ I discard it and try to think of something else.
If duty springs from the voice of God, there is a law of life which is God himself, and that, Margaret, is the law of sacrificial Love. It is the most beautiful, the most vital, the most glorious, the deepest, the highest, the most unfathomable, the clearest thing that I have ever known. I believe that it transcends all the languages that you have ever studied, all the literatures that you have ever read. It is beyond all mysteries and all knowledge. Without it every other power within us is but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. That is how I have come to feel about it through years of searching, of experimenting, of using my intelligence, of having my heart picked up and used by life itself. But the only love that you admit to be authoritative is the sexual love of man and woman. This is not the ‘love’ that has filled the centuries with the miracles of renunciation turned into power. This is not the ‘love’ that lays down its life for another, that is crucified for another, that, in losing itself for a day, finds itself to all eternity. And yet, to you, it is paramount, while my ’law’ is but an empty phrase.
Dear Margaret, I told you that I should not suggest to you the Laws on high. I fall from their æther to seek for points of contact between us, for words that come nearer meaning the same things to you and to me. Well, let me try this first. Even if you have not in you the flaming quality that I call love, have you, by any chance, a more ordinary humaneness, a rather refined unwillingness, perhaps, to inflict cruelty? I mean that sort of gentleness which made a Greek unable to watch suffering as the Romans could. You are sensitive to many delicate impressions. I used to think you rather extraordinarily perceptive of other people. It was an intellectual and æsthetic rather than a moral quality in you, but it seemed to me very real. You performed for some of us very beautiful services, just because you saw so swiftly what our needs were. And now, years later, you are making no one happy except yourself and Eugene — a rather meagre accomplishment at your age! To the disillusionment and regrets of your old friends, you are naturally indifferent. Friends usually go down like ninepins before a lover! Kenneth’s family you probably forget, in spite of their many kindnesses and services. Your own father and mother you are willing to hurt, meting out to them the normal fate of parents.
But Kenneth himself, whose happiness you once voluntarily took into your hands — can you who have been his wife really buy a new experiment in happiness at the expense of pulling down his very life in ruins about him? In view of his nature, you must know that he probably will be unable to find consolation in another marriage. You impose upon him a suffering that would be intolerable save for his own courage and patience. Madge, even if you had a right to it, would you partake of a feast in full view of a starving Volga peasant whom you had promised to feed?
But Kenneth can at least adjust his own character to the demands upon it. It is your children who call out to my pity — these tender, helpless babies, your victims. And, in a quite different way, Kenneth’s victims, too. I think you both use them as pawns and puppets in this terrible game of your emotions. You bear them away with you merely because you want them as well as your new lover. He lets them go — rather than apply his legal rights—because he wishes to be unselfish toward you. Between you their lives are divided and mutilated. But your wrong, Margaret, is the greater. You must know that their surest chance of happiness in this uncertain world lies in their being nurtured and cherished by the two who gave them life, and who love them equally. Eugene, however willing he seems now, will lack the great incentive to complete their parentage. Only the death of a father can move another man fully to take his place with little children. You think you are a good mother. But I tell you that Medea murdering her children in the madness of passion seems to me only a little more cruel than you are. She was more savage and swift. Your process will be slower, caring for the bodies of your children, but cutting away from their hearts and souls the props of a normal family life.
I speak out of the fullness of my heart. My father and mother lived together for nearly fifty years, differing from each other in temperament, in tastes, in intellectual interests, in religious beliefs, in manners, in preferences and prejudices — in everything but character. But whatever adjustments they needed to make were made in dignified silence out of the hearing or the sight of their children. No faintest echo reached us of one hour that was not one of harmony and love and mutual respect and consideration. Now their graves are side by side, under a tall fir tree that spreads its green branches over them summer and winter. They are no more one in death than they taught themselves to be in life. It was in the years after my mother’s death that I had the profound privilege of coming near to my father. One day during an illness, when his eyes, so clear and clean even in old age, were tired with pain and his slender scholar’s hand lay weak in mine, he said to me: ’I have no fear of the future life. Either there is none, — which is simple, — or I shall have it with your mother.’ Margaret, Margaret, can you steal from your daughter the chance of such an hour? In sheer humaneness can you take her from the father of whose blood and bone she is, or deprive her of his indubitable union with her mother? A child nurtured within such a marriage has most of her victories won for her in advance.
But who was ever made humane by another person’s horror? I must assume that humaneness lies not in you. I square my shoulders and try again. I must step down from virtues to manners.
Have you read a recent novel called Intrusion? Toward the end there is an interesting discussion about the ethics of a woman leaving her husband for another man. The sit nat ion is your own, there being no fault whatever to find with the husband. Most of the characters think that the woman is justified. But a certain woman is allowed by the author to touch another note in a characteristically modern tentative way. I copy it out for you. Madeleine says: —

‘We ought to pay, ought n’t we, for our own mistakes? At least, we ought n’t to make other people pay. . . . And in this case, surely, the husband did the paying. Somehow, I can’t help feeling that this woman’s refusal to pay her own debt soiled her. She may have been happier . . . I’m sure she was. . . . But she was less fine.’ Guen tossed a smoked cigarette into her empty fireplace, and lighted another. ' You mean,’ she said, as she tossed the match down after the dead cigarette, ‘that if you made a mistake, — of that sort, — you ’d go on with it. You would n’t . . . open the door?’
Madeleine hesitated. Caryl saw the color come into her face as though it disturbed her to have the subject made personal in this uncompromising fashion. ‘I think,’she said at length, ‘that I should want ... a better excuse.’
‘He’d have to do — the husband,I mean — something that killed your respect . . . that made it impossible for you to stay? You could n’t just walk out?’
Madeleine seemed to accept this. ‘It might be quite all right for others,’ she said. ‘I feel sure it is. They ’d feel unclean if they stopped. I should feel unclean if I went.’
For a moment nobody said anything. Then Allan took the pipe out of his mouth and spoke.
‘ I see,’ he said. ‘Marriage for you is what Matthew Arnold said religion was — an affair of morality touched with emotion.’
Madeleine turned her head and looked at him out of quiet eyes.
‘I think I should n’t say anything half as definite as all that,’ she told him. ‘ It’s merely my own feeling about it. I don’t feel it’s a question of morality in the ordinary sense at all: it is, to me, just what I said it was — a matter of personal fastidiousness. It sounds priggish, I know, but you can’t say what you mean in English. . . . It just is that there are some things you know you can’t do. They revolt you — like certain things to eat, or the feel of a cat’s fur.'

I had an idea, Madge, of asking you about your ‘personal fastidiousness.’ But writing out the quotation has shown me how foolish that would be! The author of the novel, whose teeth, I think, are set on edge, as mine are, by cat’s fur and maple sugar and making another person pay, admits that, if this question be one of taste, there is no room for argument. De gustibus non est disputandum! Chacun à son goût! This is the barren end of an effort to argue from physical to moral repulsions.
Dear child, I realize my impotence in this whole letter. I acknowledge that my idea of duty, my idea of self-sacrifice, my idea of humaneness, my kind of fastidiousness, to you make no appeal. But I am reluctant to own myself defeated. I shall try once more to scale the wall between us. I am now even willing to meet you on the lowest plane — your own desires.
You talk a great deal about Life — at least, I suppose you do, because that is part of the vernacular of those who either make decisions like yours or approve of them. I, too, love the word. I love the way the thing itself surges from cradle to grave. I am thrilled daily by a fresh belief that it rises out of eternal springs and flows toward an infinite sea. ‘ Fountains of living water’ — that is the greatest figure by which to describe the amazing vitality of some men and women. But they are not those who force their total energy into one passional stream. They pour it broadcast into work and play, into art and beauty, into comradeship and into leadership.
While passion exists, it tempts to isolation. But really vital natures cannot long be held within its grip alone. The joy of other creative things takes its turn in possessing them. They insist upon expressing themselves in a thousand ways disconnected with sex. If in these things they are at one with the man or woman whom they love, they are fortunate. But if not, these things do not die within them. Cisterns of genius or talent break less easily than that.
Now, to come back to yourself. You insist that you must leave Kenneth because intellectually you would ‘starve with him. Madge, dear, I do try to remember that to you it is important — and perhaps should be important — whether you starve or not! But look your condition in the face. If your intellectual store is so meagre that its replenishments are dependent upon any one person, you are likely in time to starve anyway. As for your opportunity to ‘grow’ in spite of the ‘ bonds’ of marriage, you yourself must acknowledge that your liberty with Kenneth would be as great as with Eugene. Your husband in this respect is ‘modern’ to the last degree. He would respect your economic independence. He would do all in his power — even to the point of adjusting his own work to yours — to help you to develop any gift within you. Your grandiose ‘starvation’ comes down to the mere fact that you and Kenneth have different sorts of minds. The difference exists within a certain radius of sameness; for you have both had the same kind of education and mental environment. Hundreds of able men who live with silly women, hundreds of ‘culture-loving’ women who live with philistine men, would wonder what on earth you are fussing about.
But, Margaret, you seem intellectually to be more dependent upon those about you. You and Kenneth disagree about certain things, and you and Eugene agree about them. Kenneth has ceased to interest you — if he ever did. Eugene still does interest you. Therefore you think your powers will be greater if you live with Eugene than if you live with Kenneth. I tell you brutally that you are allowing yourself to be an intellectual chameleon. Mental satisfaction does not lie that way. Riches of intellect are bought with harder coin.
But let us go on to something else. ‘Life’ contains, in addition to emotion, and in addition to the expression of gifts or talents, the prosaic business of living, of getting and preparing food, of bathing babies, of having the washing done, of buying or making clothes, of cleaning house, or paying for the coal. These details are the substratum of health and well-being. They are the bony structure of any fair existence led by men or women. Only money can prevent them from bulking very large in the life of a man and woman who set up a ménage together. Now I understand that Eugene is no more able than Kenneth or yourself to buy immunity from many ‘ petty ’ cares. I am told that his income is very limited for the family of four with which he must begin. It is probable that in marrying him you will — for a time, at least — lessen your own earning capacity. You are going to him in order to live in the same town and the same house with him; and often a woman cannot find congenial and remunerative work near her own door. It is also likely that your divorce will prove a handicap. Also you will probably have more children, which will involve a certain amount of ‘ incapacity.’ Of course, you do not care if Eugene is poor — you are willing to be poor with him. But face certain inevitable future facts. Even if you do not increase your family, your poverty will entail many renunciations for both him and you. Especially will you have to limit yourselves because of the children. In doing this, Eugene will not have the same motive that you have, and you will be constantly fretted (for I think you have this much ‘fastidiousness’) by the necessity of hampering him for the sake of another man’s children.
Furthermore, in your lives, as in all lives, there will be periods of sickness, of anxiety, of stark, drear drudgery. In the happiest and most beautiful marriages there are times when duty and self-sacrifice are stronger fortresses than romance against the assaults of outrageous fortune. But you and Eugene deny the efficacy of duty and sell-sacrifice. Upon what, then, shall you rely? Surely not on passion! That will be no defense when you are ten years older — only ten short years older! Margaret, remember that emotional life runs high in you now only because it precedes the ebb granted by a Nature kinder and wiser than ourselves. And on the ebb tide what is to bind you and Eugene, who have come together by denying the validity of the other component parts of Love? I have little faith in your being better toward each other than you are toward others. Experience has taught me that, in the long run, the different relations of life are merely outlets for the same stream. When I married, an old friend of my husband’s wrote to me: ‘You may trust him, because he has never failed in any other relation.’ If the source is muddy, mud may come through any faucet.
What, then, is the alternative for you ? I have lived long enough and diversely enough to watch the experiments of many, many people. And I can assure you that it is possible for you and Kenneth together to work your way through this devastating tempest into a serene harbor, where you will find peace for yourselves and blessings for your children. And that peace can be compounded of power, so that all your gifts — and his, for I have some concern for them also! — will bloom and blossom. I have seen it over and over in marriage. Among my acquaintances, sometimes the wife, sometimes the husband, has been caught in mid-stream by an alien passion and swept from the moorings of family life. Sometimes one or both have simply grown bored and restive. But they have held themselves in leash. They have placed their obligations before their emotions. Often they have let the struggle be seen, and have subjected their marriage to the critical or anxious comments of their friends. But in the end they have ‘won out.’ In fortunate instances they have renewed the warmth of love. At the very least, they have become comrades in the pursuit of the interests which lie outside of sex and which appeal to all intelligent men and women during the second half of ‘Life.’ Instead of having laid waste their vineyard, they have pruned it to bear better fruit. Children and grandchildren cluster on the parent stem.
For such a future, Margaret, — quite as happy as any you can anticipate with Eugene, — you would sacrifice now a few years of emotional satisfaction. I do not say this lightly. When the tide runs full, the human will might well seem impotent. But all experience proves that it is not. You have had your share — you have had a great deal more than thousands of other women. In your case passion has been benign and constructive, leaving you with two strong and beautiful children. For their sakes, you can subdue yourself. For down through the generations men and women have done it, for a cause beyond themselves. Don’t tell me you cannot sacrifice Eugene! His is not the first claim upon your sense of justice.
Sense of justice! Ah! Margaret, the word is like a bell, tolling me back to your real self. Neither Justice nor Love appeals to you. I look back over this letter. I have declined from one kind of plea down upon another, rejecting each one as still too high for you. At the end, I have been brought to accepting your own plea for happiness, and attempting only to argue that you would not find it. In doing this I perceive that I give up the fight. I own myself beaten. For never yet has common sense prevailed where the Laws on high have failed. Only an angel can ‘ride the whirlwind’ of our mortal natures.
Margaret, I am going to say one more word to you. If you were my own child, and I was told that, although you were going to do this, there was still one last thing that I might pray for, I would pray like this: ‘Let her come to me and say, “I know that this is a cruel and cowardly thing that I am doing. I know that it is damnable and rotten. But I choose to do it.” ’ Then, as you turned to go to Eugene, I could at least comfort myself with a knowledge of your honesty. ’When her day of trouble comes,’ I could say to myself, ‘she will have one clean weapon left to fight with.’
Good-bye.