Marriage and Love

Marriage and Love, by Emma
Goldman

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Title: Marriage and Love
Author: Emma Goldman
Release Date: March 1, 2007 [EBook #20715]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Marriage and Love

BY
EMMA GOLDMAN
Price Ten Cents
MOTHER EARTH PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION
210 EAST 13th STREET, NEW YORK
1911

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF
ALEXANDER BERKMAN
A Unique Contribution to Socio-Psychological Literature
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY REPRESENTS THREE PHASES:
I) The Revolutionary Awakening and its Toll--The Attentat
II) The Allegheny Penitentiary: Fourteen Years in Purgatory
III) The Resurrection and After
Price One Dollar Fifty
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Marriage and Love
BY
EMMA GOLDMAN
Price Ten Cents
MOTHER EARTH PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION
210 EAST 13th STREET, NEW YORK
1911

MARRIAGE AND LOVE
The popular notion about marriage and love is that they are
synonymous, that they spring from the same motives, and cover the
same human needs. Like most popular notions this also rests not on
actual facts, but on superstition.
Marriage and love have nothing in common; they are as far apart as the
poles; are, in fact, antagonistic to each other. No doubt some marriages
have been the result of love. Not, however, because love could assert
itself only in marriage; much rather is it because few people can
completely outgrow a convention. There are today large numbers of
men and women to whom marriage is naught but a farce, but who
submit to it for the sake of public opinion. At any rate, while it is true
that some marriages are based on love, and while it is equally true that
in some cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so
regardless of marriage, and not because of it.
On the other hand, it is utterly false that love results from marriage. On

rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple
falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found
that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable. Certainly the
growing-used to each other is far away from the spontaneity, the
intensity, and beauty of love, without which the intimacy of marriage
must prove degrading to both the woman and the man.
Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It
differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is
more binding, more exacting. Its returns are insignificantly small
compared with the investments. In taking out an insurance policy one
pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue
payments. If, however, woman's premium is a husband, she pays for it
with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, "until death
doth part." Moreover, the marriage insurance condemns her to life-long
dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual as well
as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his sphere is wider, marriage
does not limit him as much as woman. He feels his chains more in an
economic sense.
Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage.
"Ye who enter here leave all hope behind."
That marriage is a failure none but the very stupid will deny. One has
but to glance over the statistics of divorce to realize how bitter a failure
marriage really is. Nor will the stereotyped Philistine argument that the
laxity of divorce laws and the growing looseness of woman account for
the fact that: first, every twelfth marriage ends in divorce; second, that
since 1870 divorces have increased from 28 to 73 for every hundred
thousand population; third, that adultery, since 1867, as ground for
divorce, has increased 270.8 per cent.; fourth, that desertion increased
369.8 per cent.
Added to these startling figures is a vast amount of material, dramatic
and literary, further elucidating this subject. Robert Herrick, in
Together; Pinero, in Mid-Channel; Eugene Walter, in Paid in Full, and
scores of other writers are discussing the barrenness, the monotony, the
sordidness, the inadequacy of marriage as a factor for harmony and

understanding.
The thoughtful social student will not content himself with the popular
superficial excuse for this phenomenon. He will have