Sex and Common-SenseRoyden, A. Maude (Agnes Maude)
Philosophy
Sex and Common-Sense
Royden, A. Maude (Agnes Maude)
Marriage; Sex; Sexual ethics
Who that has once heard this can easily take anything less? Or who, having
loved in any of these ways, will lightly break the bond? I think that one
of the most profoundly moral relationships I have ever met between a
man and a woman was, in spite of all that I have said up till now, the
relationship of a man to a woman to whom at first he was not legally
married. It was her wish, not his, but they were not legally married. They
had no children, and she was unfaithful to him more than once, and yet this
man--and he did not call himself a Christian--this man felt that he had
taken the responsibility of that woman's life, and though he could easily
have put her away, and though, at last, she killed in him all that you
would normally call love between a man and woman, and he learned to care
for another woman, yet he would not abandon her because now she had grown
to need him, and he felt he could not take so great a human responsibility
as the life of another person and then cast it away as though it had never
been. That is morality. To such a sense of what human relationships demand
my whole soul gives homage. That seems to me a perfectly humane and,
therefore, truly moral idea of what love involves. Such a sense of
responsibility should go with all love. Passion cannot last, in the nature
of things, and, therefore, those who marry do so, if they know anything
at all of love--and, God help them, many of them do not--but if they know
anything at all of love, they know that it is physically impossible for
this particular bond always to unite them. They must be aware that there
is something more than that, something that must in the end transcend that
physical union.
Looking at marriage from that point of view, can one desire that it should
be anything less than permanent, indissoluble? That which God made, and,
therefore, which no man should put asunder? Let the community--both Church
and State--teach this. Let us make it clear that men and women should not
marry unless they do sincerely believe that their love for each other is
of this character. Let them understand that physical union should be
the expression of a spiritual union. Let them learn that love, though it
includes passion, is more than passion, and must transcend and outlive
passion. And let us insist that all should learn the truth about
themselves--about their own bodies and about their own natures--so that
they may understand what they do, and may have all the help that knowledge
can give in doing it. I hold that on such knowledge and such understanding
the community should insist, if it is to uphold the high and difficult
standard of indissoluble monogamous marriage. So only _can_ it be rightly
upheld.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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