The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization: Translated from the Sixth German EditionBloch, Iwan
Philosophy
The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization: Translated from the Sixth German Edition
Bloch, Iwan
Sex; Sexual ethics
“The delicate erotic sentiment of the present day shrinks from
becoming a fetter; it shuns the possibility of becoming a hindrance.”
Free divorce, in a case of unhappy marriage, is no less necessary when
there are children to the marriage. The =duties= of the parents to the
children remain in such cases unaltered, without, however, thus
rendering it necessary that the parents should continue to live
together. For the sorrows of such a union, and the harm done thereby to
the children, are greater than those that would result from divorce.
Human love has its phases of development. It does not remain for ever
the same, but it alters _pari passu_ with the evolution of the
individual. Lifelong love is an ideal, but it is not a duty. Such a
demand would as inevitably destroy personality as would the demand for
the unconditional belief in a doctrine, or for the unconditional pursuit
of a profession.
Very interesting is Ellen Key’s description of the numerous disillusions
of love, which become still more perceptible in a coercive marriage.
There is a whole series of “typical unhappy fates” in marriage, often
with no blame properly attaching to either party, dependent merely upon
incompatibility of temperament, but also upon faults of one or both
parties to the marriage.
Frequently a man or a woman of a thoroughly sympathetic temperament
lives with a woman or a man of such faultless excellence that the home
seems filled with icicles. One day the husband or the wife runs away
because the air has become so thin as to be irrespirable. The general
sentiment is one of commiseration for the--superlatively excellent man
or woman!
In the case of earnest, mature human beings, free divorce will not
increase the number of dissolutions of marriage. On the contrary, the
obligations imposed by a free relationship are greater than those of
legal coercive marriage. The fear also that with the granting of free
divorce every one will enter upon numerous free marriages one after
another is groundless. It is precisely those who are united in free love
to whom such a separation, when it does become necessary, is so
profoundly painful, that life itself forbids the frequent repetition of
such unhappiness.
Very beautiful, and based upon lofty ethical conceptions, are the
writer’s views regarding the necessity for divorce precisely in view of
the existence of children. She says:
“Men and women of earlier times went on patching up for ever and ever.
The psychologically developed generation of to-day is more inclined to
let the broken remain broken. For, except in those cases in which
objective misfortunes, or a retarded evolution, gave rise to a
rupture, patched-up marriage, like patched-up engagements, seldom
prove durable. Often it was owing to profound instincts that the
rupture became inevitable; reconciliations fortify these instincts,
and sooner or later they once more find free vent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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