Getting Married | Page 2

desired, clandestine irregularities
are negligible as an alternative to marriage. How common they are
nobody knows; for in spite of the powerful protection afforded to the
parties by the law of libel, and the readiness of society on various other
grounds to be hoodwinked by the keeping up of the very thinnest
appearances, most of them are probably never suspected. But they are

neither dignified nor safe and comfortable, which at once rules them
out for normal decent people. Marriage remains practically inevitable;
and the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we shall set to work to
make it decent and reasonable.
WHAT DOES THE WORD MARRIAGE MEAN
However much we may all suffer through marriage, most of us think so
little about it that we regard it as a fixed part of the order of nature, like
gravitation. Except for this error, which may be regarded as constant,
we use the word with reckless looseness, meaning a dozen different
things by it, and yet always assuming that to a respectable man it can
have only one meaning. The pious citizen, suspecting the Socialist (for
example) of unmentionable things, and asking him heatedly whether he
wishes to abolish marriage, is infuriated by a sense of unanswerable
quibbling when the Socialist asks him what particular variety of
marriage he means: English civil marriage, sacramental marriage,
indissoluble Roman Catholic marriage, marriage of divorced persons,
Scotch marriage, Irish marriage, French, German, Turkish, or South
Dakotan marriage. In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized
countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties wish it,
without any question of conduct. That is what marriage means in
Sweden. In Clapham that is what they call by the senseless name of
Free Love. In the British Empire we have unlimited Kulin polygamy,
Muslim polygamy limited to four wives, child marriages, and, nearer
home, marriages of first cousins: all of them abominations in the eyes
of many worthy persons. Not only may the respectable British
champion of marriage mean any of these widely different institutions;
sometimes he does not mean marriage at all. He means monogamy,
chastity, temperance, respectability, morality, Christianity,
anti-socialism, and a dozen other things that have no necessary
connection with marriage. He often means something that he dare not
avow: ownership of the person of another human being, for instance.
And he never tells the truth about his own marriage either to himself or
any one else.
With those individualists who in the mid-XIXth century dreamt of
doing away with marriage altogether on the ground that it is a private
concern between the two parties with which society has nothing to do,
there is now no need to deal. The vogue of "the self-regarding action"

has passed; and it may be assumed without argument that unions for the
purpose of establishing a family will continue to be registered and
regulated by the State. Such registration is marriage, and will continue
to be called marriage long after the conditions of the registration have
changed so much that no citizen now living would recognize them as
marriage conditions at all if he revisited the earth. There is therefore no
question of abolishing marriage; but there is a very pressing question of
improving its conditions. I have never met anybody really in favor of
maintaining marriage as it exists in England to-day. A Roman Catholic
may obey his Church by assenting verbally to the doctrine of
indissoluble marriage. But nobody worth counting believes directly,
frankly, and instinctively that when a person commits a murder and is
put into prison for twenty years for it, the free and innocent husband or
wife of that murderer should remain bound by the marriage. To put it
briefly, a contract for better for worse is a contract that should not be
tolerated. As a matter of fact it is not tolerated fully even by the Roman
Catholic Church; for Roman Catholic marriages can be dissolved, if not
by the temporal Courts, by the Pope. Indissoluble marriage is an
academic figment, advocated only by celibates and by comfortably
married people who imagine that if other couples are uncomfortable it
must be their own fault, just as rich people are apt to imagine that if
other people are poor it serves them right. There is always some means
of dissolution. The conditions of dissolution may vary widely, from
those on which Henry VIII. procured his divorce from Katharine of
Arragon to the pleas on which American wives obtain divorces (for
instance, "mental anguish" caused by the husband's neglect to cut his
toenails); but there is always some point at which the theory of the
inviolable better-for-worse marriage breaks down in practice. South
Carolina has indeed passed what is called a freak law declaring that a
marriage shall not be dissolved under any