Love and Marriage
Ellen Key, 1904
Is a marriage good simply because it has been contracted? In 1904 the Swedish writer Ellen Key answered “no” and explained what a union really rests on: love, which cannot be promised but can be earned every day. This is a book about fidelity, freedom, children and money in a couple, bold for its time and at places out of date.
Who it is for
For those who live as a couple, are moving into one or out of one, and want to understand what makes a union alive and what merely holds it together on paper.
No one can promise to love or not to love, any more than one can promise to live long. A person can promise only one thing: to take good care of their life and of their love.
A union that has to be earned
Imagine two people at one table. They share a surname, a bank account and a bed, and on any form both have the same words for their marital status. But they talk only about purchases and bills, and each feels lonely in their own home. Is this a good union? For the law and for the neighbours, yes: the stamp is there, so all is in order.
The Swedish writer Ellen Key answered differently in 1904, and for that answer she was called a preacher of immorality. Her book “Love and Marriage” argues with the idea that marriage is good simply because it has been contracted. For Key, the value of a union is decided not by the ritual but by what it does to two people and to the children who grow up beside them.
Here you will learn why love, in Key's view, rests on two pillars at once, why not to hurry with the first feeling, and how people who are different can live together. You will learn why fidelity cannot be promised once and for all, what children really need when their parents quarrel or part, and why money in a couple concerns dignity, not only the budget.
Let us be honest from the start: this is a book from 1904, and part of it is out of date. Key considered motherhood the highest calling of almost every woman, and she judged love partly by whether it serves the “improvement of the race”. This is eugenics, and today that part of her views is rejected. But her main question, what holds a living union together, sounds as if it were asked today. If it has ever occurred to you, this book is for you.
A stamp does not make a union honest
Key begins with an argument with Martin Luther, a man she respects in her own way. Luther, a former monk, married a former nun, and Key agrees with the old saying that the courage of that act was worth more than all his teaching. Luther gave marriage back its right to bodily life. But, in her words, he knew nothing about love, so in his teaching marriage blessed almost any union: a sick person with a healthy one, an old man with a young woman, two people whom relatives had matched and who did not want each other.
Key describes what this had turned into by her time. A couple who married on the most basic calculations is respected by the community, because they have a piece of paper. And two young people who live together only out of love will be made to feel shame by the same community. It turns out that what makes a union moral is not the seriousness of the feeling but the official stamp of society.
Her answer sounds like a rule of assessment. The morality of a couple cannot be issued in advance, on the day of registration, and cannot be taken away in advance either. Every new couple, whatever form of shared life it chooses, must prove its right itself. There is one proof: whether two people beside each other become stronger, kinder, more honest and more alive, or poorer and meaner.
Hence one more thought worth trying on yourself. Key notes that a person who is healthy and honest at work and in other matters is usually honest in love as well. And someone who cheats in business will most likely cheat in love too, whatever rules he proclaims. Love shows a person more precisely than any other part of his life.
Try looking at your union through her eyes. The question is not whether we are formally in order, but what is happening with us: what we teach each other, who we are becoming, whether we want to live beside each other at full strength. The mistake Key warns against is judging a couple by its form rather than by its fruits. It is so easy to excuse a dead marriage and condemn a living love.
About the author
Ellen Key (1849-1926), Swedish writer, teacher and thinker, author of “The Century of the Child”. For twenty years she gave lectures on the history of culture at the People's University in Stockholm.
All books by this author: Ellen Key
Terms from the book
- Shakespeare
- eugenics
- Luther
- Schopenhauer
- Delacroix: Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), French Romantic painter, who left a well-known diary.
- Romeo: The hero of Shakespeare's tragedy “Romeo and Juliet”. At the start of the play he is in love with Rosaline, who rejects him.
- Rosaline: The girl from “Romeo and Juliet” whom Romeo loves before he meets Juliet. She never appears on stage.
- Juliet: The heroine of Shakespeare's tragedy, Romeo's beloved.
- Carpenter: Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), English writer and social reformer, author of the book on love and marriage “Love's Coming of Age” (1896).
- Courts of Love: What later tradition calls the gatherings of noble ladies and poets in southern France in the twelfth century, where supposedly “cases” of love were judged. Historians doubt that such courts existed literally.
- separate property: A regime in which each spouse owns what belongs to them personally, and only what they have agreed on becomes common.
All terms
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