A person proposing or
accepting a contract not only to do something but to like doing it
would be certified as mad. Yet popular superstition credits the
wedding rite with the power of fixing our fancies or affections
for life even under the most unnatural conditions.
THE IMPERSONALITY OF SEX
It is necessary to lay some stress on these points, because few
realize the extent to which we proceed on the assumption that
marriage is a short cut to perfect and permanent intimacy and
affection. But there is a still more unworkable assumption which
must be discarded before discussions of marriage can get into any
sort of touch with the facts of life. That assumption is that the
specific relation which marriage authorizes between the parties is
the most intimate and personal of human relations, and embraces
all the other high human relations. Now this is violently untrue.
Every adult knows that the relation in question can and does exist
between entire strangers, different in language, color, tastes,
class, civilization, morals, religion, character: in everything,
in short, except their bodily homology and the reproductive
appetite common to all living organisms. Even hatred, cruelty, and
contempt are not incompatible with it; and jealousy and murder are
as near to it as affectionate friendship.
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