XXV. Love

REMEMBER that it is not my fault that we find ourselves discussing so inflammable a topic! But if you insist on knowing what education can do to bring our conduct in the realm of love up to the standard of civilization, I can but answer your question. We have found that in the realm of work, civilization demands of us Enterprise, and Democracy, and Responsibility. And I think that all the demands of civilization upon our conduct in the realm of love might be summed up in the same terms. We despise those persons who are afraid of adventure in love; who in devotion to some mawkish dream-ideal, turn away from the more difficult and poignant realities of courtship and marriage; and we are beginning to despise those whose enterprise is too cheaply satisfied in prostitution or in the undemocratic masculine exploitation of women of inferior economic status; and not only the crasser offences against sexual morality, but a[Pg 181] thousand less definable but not less real offences within the realm of legal marriage, may be described as attempts to evade responsibility. I leave you to work out the implications of this system of morals for yourself. What I particularly want to speak of here is the effect of parental influences upon children with respect to their later love-life, and the function of education in dissolving those influences.

It is no secret that adults generally have not yet learned how to be happy in love. And the reason for that, aside from the economic obstacles to happiness which do not come within the scope of our inquiry, is that they are still children. They are seeking to renew in an adult relationship the bond which existed between themselves and their parents in infancy. Or they are seeking to settle a long-forgotten childish grudge against their parents, by assuming the parental r?le in this new relationship. And in both efforts, they find themselves encouraged by each other. Naturally enough! A woman likes to discover, and enjoys “mothering,” the child in her husband; she likes to find also in him the god and hero which her father was to her in her infancy. And a happy marriage is one in which a man is at any moment unashamedly her child or (let us not shrink from[Pg 182] using these infantile and romantic terms!) her god. But it is a bore to have to mother a man all the time; it is in fact slavery. And it is equally a bore to have to look up to a man all the time and think him wise and obey him; for that also is slavery. The happy marriage has something else—the capacity for swift and unconscious change and interchange of these r?les. The happy lovers can vary the tenor of their relationship because they are free to be more than one thing to each other. And they have that freedom because they are equals. That equality is comradeship, is friendship.

Do not imagine that friendship in love implies any absence of that profound worship and self-surrender which is characteristic of the types of love that are modelled upon the infantile and parental patterns. This is as ridiculous as it would be to suppose that equality in other fields of life means that no one shall ever lead and no one ever follow. Equality in love means only the freedom to experience all, instead of compulsion to experience only a part, of the emotional possibilities of love in a single relationship.

I would gladly explicate this aspect of my theme in some detail, were it not that it might incidentally comprise a catalogue of domestic difficulties[Pg 183] and misunderstandings at once too tragic and too ridiculous—and some of you might object to my unfolding what you would consider to be your own unique and private woes in public.

I will, therefore, only point out that even what we term the civilized part of mankind is far from measuring up to this demand of civilization in the world of love, the demand for equality. It may seem somewhat of an impertinence to blame this fact upon the early influences of the home, when there are so many outstanding customs and laws and economic conditions which are founded on the theory of the inequality of men and women. But these customs and laws and conditions are in process of change—and the home influences of which I speak are not. Our problem is to consider if these influences may not be dissolved by the school. For, mark you, what happens when they are not! Wedded love, as based upon those undissolved influences, comes into a kind of disgrace; serious-minded men and women ask themselves whether such a bondage is tolerable; a thousand dramas and novels expose the iniquities of the thing; and the more intellectually adventurous in each generation begin to wonder if the attempt at faithful and permanent love ought not to be abandoned.

[Pg 184]Let me relate only one widely typical—and perhaps only too-familiar—instance. A boy grows up poisoned with mother-love—er, I mean, petted and praised and waited upon by his mother, until he finds the outside world, with its comparative indifference to his wonderfulness, a very cold place indeed. Nevertheless, he adjusts himself to it, becomes a man, and falls in love. With whom does he fall in love? Perhaps with a girl like his mother; or perhaps with one quite opposite to her in all respects,—for he may have conceived an unconscious resentment against his mother, for betraying him by her praise into expecting too much of an unfeeling world. But in any case, he is going to experience again, in his relationship with his sweetheart, the ancient delights of being mothered. He is going to respond to that pleasure so unmistakably as to encourage the girl in further demonstrations of motherliness. He is in fact going to reward her more for motherliness than for any other trait in her possession. And the girl, who wants a lover and a husband and a man, is going to find herself with a child on her hands. But that is not the worst. If the girl does not rebel against the situation, the man is likely to, when he finds out just what it is. For he, too, despite his unconscious infantilism,[Pg 185] wants a girl and a sweetheart and a wife. And when he realizes that he is being sealed up again in the over-close, over-sweet love-nest of his infancy, that he is becoming a baby, he revolts. He does not realize what has happened—he only knows that he no longer cherishes a romantic love for her. Naturally. Romantic love is a love between equals. She has become his mother—and he flees her, and perhaps goes through life seeking and escaping from his mother in half a hundred women. When this happens, we call him a Don Juan or a libertine or a scoundrel or a fool. But that does not alter his helplessness in the grip of infantile compulsions.

I do not wish to exaggerate the ability of education to dissolve, without the aid of a special psychic technique, any deeply-rooted infantile dispositions of this sort; but, aside from such flagrant cases, there are thousands of well-conducted men and women who just fail to free themselves sufficiently from the emotions of childhood to be happy in love. Besides their own selves, the sensible adult beings that they believe they are, there are within them pathetic and absurd children whose demands upon the relationship well-nigh tear it to pieces. It is in regard to these that it seems not improbable that a civilized education[Pg 186] could secure their happiness for them. And it would do so by supplanting the emotionally over-laden atmosphere of the home with the invigorating air of equality. I refer in particular to equality between the sexes. So long as girls and boys are to any extent educated separately, encouraged to play separately, and treated as different kinds of beings, the remoteness hinders the growth of real friendship between the sexes, and leaves the mind empty of any realistic concepts which would serve to resist the transfer to the other sex, at the romantic age, of repressed infantile feelings about the beloved parent. What we have to deal with in children might without much exaggeration be described as the disinclination of one who has been a lover to become a friend. The emotions of the boy towards his mother are so rich and deep that he is inclined to scorn the tamer emotions of friendship with girl-children. (Notoriously, he falls in love first with older women in whom he finds some idealized image of his mother.) He is contemptuous of little girls because they are not the mother-goddess of his infancy. What he must learn, and the sooner the better, is that girls are interesting human beings, that they are good comrades and jolly playfellows. He must learn to[Pg 187] like them for what they are. Ordinarily, the love-life of the adolescent boy is a series of more or less shocked discoveries that the women upon whom he has set his youthful fancy do not, in fact, correspond to his infantile dream. Half the difficulties of marriage are involved in the painful adjustment of the man to the human realities of his beloved; the other half being, of course, the similarly painful adjustment of the girl to similar human realities. He could be quite happy with her, were the other dear charmer, his infantile ideal, away. And it is one of the functions of education to chase this ideal away, to dissolve the early emotional bond to the parent, by making the real world in general and the real other sex in particular so humanly interesting that it will be preferred to the infantile fantasy.

I may be mistaken, but I think that half of this task will be easy enough. Girls, I am sure, are only in appearance and by way of saving their face, scornful of the activities of boys; they will be glad enough to join with them on terms of complete equality, and ready to admire and like them for what they humanly are. It will not be so easy to persuade boys to admire and like girls for what they are; and it will be the business of the school to dramatize unmistakably for these[Pg 188] young masculine eyes the human interestingness of the other sex—to give the girls a chance to show their actual ability to compete on equal and non-romantic terms with boys in all their common undertakings.

To make realities more interesting than dreams—that is the task of education. And of all the realities whose values we ignore, in childish preoccupation with our feeble dreams, the human realities of companionship which each sex has to offer the other are among the richest. Despite all our romantic serenadings, men and women have only begun to discover each other. Just as, despite our solemn sermonizings on the blessedness of work, we have only begun to discover what creative activity can really mean to us. Work and love!—

A Voice. “Won’t you please come back to the subject of education?”

What! Is it possible—is it credible—is it conceivable—that you have been following this discussion thus far, and have not yet realized that education includes everything on earth, and in the heavens above and the waters beneath? Come back to the subject of education! Why, it is impossible to wander away from the subject of education! I defy you to do so. All the books that[Pg 189] have ever been written, all the pictures that have ever been painted, all the songs ever sung, all the machines ever invented, all the wars and all the governments, all the joyous and sorry loves of men and women, are but part of that vast process, the education of mankind. When you leave this discussion, you will not have dropped the subject; you will continue it in your next conversation, whether it be with your employer or your sweetheart or your milkman. You cannot get away from it. And though you perish, and an earthquake overwhelms your city in ruins, and the continent on which you live sinks in the sea, something that you have done or helped to do, something which has been a part of your life, the twisted fragments of the office building where you went to work or the old meerschaum pipe you so patiently coloured, will be dug up and gazed upon by future generations, and what you can teach them by these poor relics if by nothing else, will be a part of their education....