27. The Charm of Mystery
Monogamous marriage, by its very conditions, tends to break down
this strangeness. It forces the two contracting parties into an
intimacy that is too persistent and unmitigated; they are in contact at
too many points, and too steadily. By and by all the mystery of the
relation is gone, and they stand in the unsexed position of brother
and sister. Thus that "maximum of temptation" of which Shaw
speaks has within itself
the seeds of its own decay. A husband
begins by kissing a pretty girl, his wife; it is pleasant to have her so
handy and so willing. He ends by making machiavellian efforts to
avoid kissing the every day sharer of his meals, books, bath towels,
pocketbook, relatives, ambitions, secrets, malaises and business: a
proceeding about as romantic as having his boots blacked. The
thing is too horribly dismal for words. Not all the native
sentimentalism of man can overcome the distaste and boredom that
get into it. Not all the histrionic capacity of woman can attach any
appearance of gusto and spontaneity toit.
An estimable lady psychologist of the American Republic, Mrs.
Marion Cox, in a somewhat florid book entitled "Ventures into
Worlds," has a sagacious essay upon this subject. She calls the
essay "Our Incestuous Marriage," and argues accurately that, once
the adventurous descends to the habitual, it takes on an offensive
and degrading character. The intimate approach, to give genuine
joy, must be a concession, a feat of persuasion, a victory; once it
loses that character it loses everything. Such a destructive
conversion is effected by the
average monogamous marriage.
It breaks down all mystery and reserve, for how can mystery and
reserve survive the use of the same hot water bag and a joint
concern about butter and egg bills? What remains, at least on the
husband's side, is esteem--the feeling one, has for an amiable aunt.
And confidence--the emotion evoked by a lawyer, a dentist ora
fortune-teller. And habit--the thing which makes it possible to eat
the same breakfast every day, and to windup one's watch regularly,
and to earn a living.
Mrs. Cox, if I remember her dissertation correctly, proposes to
prevent this stodgy dephlogistication of marriage by interrupting its
course--that is, by separating the parties now and then, so that
neither will become too familiar and commonplace to the other. By
this means, she, argues, curiosity will be periodically revived, and
there will be a chance for personality to expand a cappella, and so
each reunion will have in it something of the surprise, the adventure
and the virtuous satanry of the honeymoon. The husband will not
come back to precisely the same wife that he parted from, and the
wife will not welcome precisely the same husband. Even supposing
them to have gone
on substantially as if together, they will have
gone on out of sight and hearing of each other, Thus each will
find the other, to some extent at least, a stranger, and hence a bit
challenging, and hence a bit charming. The scheme has merit.
More, it has been tried often, and with success. It is, indeed, a
familiar observation that the happiest couples are those who are
occasionally separated, and the fact has been embalmed in the trite
maxim that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Perhaps not
actually fonder, but at any rate more tolerant, more curious, more
eager. Two difficulties, however, stand in the way of the
widespread adoption of the remedy. One lies in its costliness: the,
average couple cannot afford a double establishment, even
temporarily. The other lies in the fact that it inevitably arouses the
envy and ill-nature of those who cannot adopt it, and so causes a
gabbling of scandal. The world invariably suspects the worst. Let
man and wife separate to save their happiness from suffocation in
the kitchen, the dining room and the connubial chamber, and it will
immediately conclude that the corpse is already laid out in the
drawing-room.
