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GETTING MARRIED

Preface To "Getting Married"

By Bernard Shaw

1908


Transcriber's Note -- The edition from which this play was taken was
printed without most contractions, such as dont for don't and so forth.
These have been left as printed in the original text. Also, abbreviated
honorifics have no trailing period, and the word show is spelt shew.




PREFACE TO GETTING MARRIED




THE REVOLT AGAINST MARRIAGE

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and
thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and thinking
it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into disastrous anarchical
action. Because our marriage law is inhuman and unreasonable to the
point of downright abomination, the bolder and more rebellious spirits
form illicit unions, defiantly sending cards round to their friends
announcing what they have done. Young women come to me and ask me
whether I think they ought to consent to marry the man they have decided
to live with; and they are perplexed and astonished when I, who am
supposed (heaven knows why!) to have the most advanced views attainable
on the subject, urge them on no account to compromize themselves without
the security of an authentic wedding ring. They cite the example of
George Eliot, who formed an illicit union with Lewes. They quote
a saying attributed to Nietzsche, that a married philosopher is
ridiculous, though the men of their choice are not philosophers. When
they finally give up the idea of reforming our marriage institutions by
private enterprise and personal righteousness, and consent to be led to
the Registry or even to the altar, they insist on first arriving at an
explicit understanding that both parties are to be perfectly free to sip
every flower and change every hour, as their fancy may dictate, in
spite of the legal bond. I do not observe that their unions prove
less monogamic than other people's: rather the contrary, in fact;
consequently, I do not know whether they make less fuss than ordinary
people when either party claims the benefit of the treaty; but the
existence of the treaty shews the same anarchical notion that the law
can be set aside by any two private persons by the simple process of
promising one another to ignore it.




MARRIAGE NEVERTHELESS INEVITABLE

Now most laws are, and all laws ought to be, stronger than the
strongest individual. Certainly the marriage law is. The only people
who successfully evade it are those who actually avail themselves of its
shelter by pretending to be married when they are not, and by Bohemians
who have no position to lose and no career to be closed. In every other
case open violation of the marriage laws means either downright ruin or
such inconvenience and disablement as a prudent man or woman would get
married ten times over rather than face. And these disablements and
inconveniences are not even the price of freedom; for, as Brieux has
shewn so convincingly in Les Hannetons, an avowedly illicit union is
often found in practice to be as tyrannical and as hard to escape from
as the worst legal one.

We may take it then that when a joint domestic establishment, involving
questions of children or property, is contemplated, marriage is in
effect compulsory upon all normal people; and until the law is altered
there is nothing for us but to make the best of it as it stands. Even
when no such establishment is desired, clandestine irregularities are
negligible as an alternative to marriage. How common they are nobody
knows; for in spite of the powerful protection afforded to the parties
by the law of libel, and the readiness of society on various other
grounds to be hoodwinked by the keeping up of the very thinnest
appearances, most of them are probably never suspected. But they are
neither dignified nor safe and comfortable, which at once rules them out
for normal decent people. Marriage remains practically inevitable; and
the sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we shall set to work to make
it decent and reasonable.




WHAT DOES THE WORD MARRIAGE MEAN

However much we may all suffer through marriage, most of us think
so little about it that we regard it as a fixed part of the order of
nature, like gravitation. Except for this error, which may be regarded
as constant, we use the word with reckless looseness, meaning a dozen
different things by it, and yet always assuming that to a respectable
man it can have only one meaning. The pious citizen, suspecting the
Socialist (for example) of unmentionable things, and asking him heatedly
whether he wishes to abolish marriage, is infuriated by a sense of
unanswerable quibbling when the Socialist asks him what particular
variety of marriage he means: English civil marriage, sacramental
marriage, indissoluble Roman Catholic marriage, marriage of divorced
persons, Scotch marriage, Irish marriage, French, German, Turkish, or
South Dakotan marriage. In Sweden, one of the most highly civilized
countries in the world, a marriage is dissolved if both parties wish it,
without any question of conduct. That is what marriage means in Sweden.
In Clapham that is what they call by the senseless name of Free Love.
In the British Empire we have unlimited Kulin polygamy, Muslim polygamy
limited to four wives, child marriages, and, nearer home, marriages
of first cousins: all of them abominations in the eyes of many worthy
persons. Not only may the respectable British champion of marriage mean
any of these widely different institutions; sometimes he does not
mean marriage at all. He means monogamy, chastity, temperance,
respectability, morality, Christianity, anti-socialism, and a dozen
other things that have no necessary connection with marriage. He often
means something that he dare not avow: ownership of the person of
another human being, for instance. And he never tells the truth about
his own marriage either to himself or any one else.

With those individualists who in the mid-XIXth century dreamt of doing
away with marriage altogether on the ground that it is a private concern
between the two parties with which society has nothing to do, there
is now no need to deal. The vogue of "the self-regarding action" has
passed; and it may be assumed without argument that unions for the
purpose of establishing a family will continue to be registered and
regulated by the State. Such registration is marriage, and will continue
to be called marriage long after the conditions of the registration
have changed so much that no citizen now living would recognize them as
marriage conditions at all if he revisited the earth. There is therefore
no question of abolishing marriage; but there is a very pressing
question of improving its conditions. I have never met anybody really
in favor of maintaining marriage as it exists in England to-day. A Roman
Catholic may obey his Church by assenting verbally to the doctrine of
indissoluble marriage. But nobody worth counting believes directly,
frankly, and instinctively that when a person commits a murder and is
put into prison for twenty years for it, the free and innocent husband
or wife of that murderer should remain bound by the marriage. To put it
briefly, a contract for better for worse is a contract that should not
be tolerated. As a matter of fact it is not tolerated fully even by the
Roman Catholic Church; for Roman Catholic marriages can be dissolved,
if not by the temporal Courts, by the Pope. Indissoluble marriage is an
academic figment, advocated only by celibates and by comfortably married
people who imagine that if other couples are uncomfortable it must be
their own fault, just as rich people are apt to imagine that if other
people are poor it serves them right. There is always some means of
dissolution. The conditions of dissolution may vary widely, from those
on which Henry VIII. procured his divorce from Katharine of Arragon to
the pleas on which American wives obtain divorces (for instance, "mental
anguish" caused by the husband's neglect to cut his toenails); but
there is always some point at which the theory of the inviolable
better-for-worse marriage breaks down in practice. South Carolina has
indeed passed what is called a freak law declaring that a marriage shall
not be dissolved under any circumstances; but such an absurdity will
probably be repealed or amended by sheer force of circumstances before
these words are in print. The only question to be considered is, What
shall the conditions of the dissolution be?




SURVIVALS OF SEX SLAVERY

If we adopt the common romantic assumption that the object of marriage
is bliss, then the very strongest reason for dissolving a marriage is
that it shall be disagreeable to one or other or both of the parties.
If we accept the view that the object of marriage is to provide for
the production and rearing of children, then childlessness should be a
conclusive reason for dissolution. As neither of these causes entitles
married persons to divorce it is at once clear that our marriage law is
not founded on either assumption. What it is really founded on is the
morality of the tenth commandment, which English women will one day
succeed in obliterating from the walls of our churches by refusing to
enter any building where they are publicly classed with a man's house,
his ox, and his ass, as his purchased chattels. In this morality female
adultery is malversation by the woman and theft by the man, whilst male
adultery with an unmarried woman is not an offence at all. But though
this is not only the theory of our marriage laws, but the practical
morality of many of us, it is no longer an avowed morality, nor does
its persistence depend on marriage; for the abolition of marriage would,
other things remaining unchanged, leave women more effectually enslaved
than they now are. We shall come to the question of the economic
dependence of women on men later on; but at present we had better
confine ourselves to the theories of marriage which we are not ashamed
to acknowledge and defend, and upon which, therefore, marriage reformers
will be obliged to proceed.

We may, I think, dismiss from the field of practical politics the
extreme sacerdotal view of marriage as a sacred and indissoluble
covenant, because though reinforced by unhappy marriages as all
fanaticisms are reinforced by human sacrifices, it has been reduced to
a private and socially inoperative eccentricity by the introduction of
civil marriage and divorce. Theoretically, our civilly married couples
are to a Catholic as unmarried couples are: that is, they are living in
open sin. Practically, civilly married couples are received in society,
by Catholics and everyone else, precisely as sacramentally married
couples are; and so are people who have divorced their wives or husbands
and married again. And yet marriage is enforced by public opinion with
such ferocity that the least suggestion of laxity in its support is
fatal to even the highest and strongest reputations, although laxity
of conduct is winked at with grinning indulgence; so that we find the
austere Shelley denounced as a fiend in human form, whilst Nelson, who
openly left his wife and formed a menage a trois with Sir William and
Lady Hamilton, was idolized. Shelley might have had an illegitimate
child in every county in England if he had done so frankly as a
sinner. His unpardonable offence was that he attacked marriage as an
institution. We feel a strange anguish of terror and hatred against
him, as against one who threatens us with a mortal injury. What is the
element in his proposals that produces this effect?

The answer of the specialists is the one already alluded to: that
the attack on marriage is an attack on property; so that Shelley was
something more hateful to a husband than a horse thief: to wit, a wife
thief, and something more hateful to a wife than a burglar: namely, one
who would steal her husband's house from over her head, and leave her
destitute and nameless on the streets. Now, no doubt this accounts for
a good deal of anti-Shelleyan prejudice: a prejudice so deeply rooted
in our habits that, as I have shewn in my play, men who are bolder
freethinkers than Shelley himself can no more bring themselves to commit
adultery than to commit any common theft, whilst women who loathe sex
slavery more fiercely than Mary Wollstonecraft are unable to face the
insecurity and discredit of the vagabondage which is the masterless
woman's only alternative to celibacy. But in spite of all this there
is a revolt against marriage which has spread so rapidly within my
recollection that though we all still assume the existence of a huge and
dangerous majority which regards the least hint of scepticism as to the
beauty and holiness of marriage as infamous and abhorrent, I sometimes
wonder why it is so difficult to find an authentic living member of this
dreaded army of convention outside the ranks of the people who never
think about public questions at all, and who, for all their numerical
weight and apparently invincible prejudices, accept social changes
to-day as tamely as their forefathers accepted the Reformation under
Henry and Edward, the Restoration under Mary, and, after Mary's death,
the shandygaff which Elizabeth compounded from both doctrines and called
the Articles of the Church of England. If matters were left to these
simple folk, there would never be any changes at all; and society would
perish like a snake that could not cast its skins. Nevertheless the
snake does change its skin in spite of them; and there are signs that
our marriage-law skin is causing discomfort to thoughtful people and
will presently be cast whether the others are satisfied with it or not.
The question therefore arises: What is there in marriage that makes the
thoughtful people so uncomfortable?




A NEW ATTACK ON MARRIAGE

The answer to this question is an answer which everybody knows and
nobody likes to give. What is driving our ministers of religion and
statesmen to blurt it out at last is the plain fact that marriage is now
beginning to depopulate the country with such alarming rapidity that we
are forced to throw aside our modesty like people who, awakened by an
alarm of fire, rush into the streets in their nightdresses or in no
dresses at all. The fictitious Free Lover, who was supposed to attack
marriage because it thwarted his inordinate affections and prevented him
from making life a carnival, has vanished and given place to the very
real, very strong, very austere avenger of outraged decency who declares
that the licentiousness of marriage, now that it no longer recruits the
race, is destroying it.

As usual, this change of front has not yet been noticed by our newspaper
controversialists and by the suburban season-ticket holders whose minds
the newspapers make. They still defend the citadel on the side on which
nobody is attacking it, and leave its weakest front undefended.

The religious revolt against marriage is a very old one. Christianity
began with a fierce attack on marriage; and to this day the celibacy
of the Roman Catholic priesthood is a standing protest against its
compatibility with the higher life. St. Paul's reluctant sanction of
marriage; his personal protest that he countenanced it of necessity and
against his own conviction; his contemptuous "better to marry than to
burn" is only out of date in respect of his belief that the end of the
world was at hand and that there was therefore no longer any population
question. His instinctive recoil from its worst aspect as a slavery to
pleasure which induces two people to accept slavery to one another has
remained an active force in the world to this day, and is now stirring
more uneasily than ever. We have more and more Pauline celibates whose
objection to marriage is the intolerable indignity of being supposed
to desire or live the married life as ordinarily conceived. Every
thoughtful and observant minister of religion is troubled by the
determination of his flock to regard marriage as a sanctuary for
pleasure, seeing as he does that the known libertines of his parish are
visibly suffering much less from intemperance than many of the married
people who stigmatize them as monsters of vice.




A FORGOTTEN CONFERENCE OF MARRIED MEN

The late Hugh Price Hughes, an eminent Methodist divine, once organized
in London a conference of respectable men to consider the subject.
Nothing came of it (nor indeed could have come of it in the absence of
women); but it had its value as giving the young sociologists present,
of whom I was one, an authentic notion of what a picked audience
of respectable men understood by married life. It was certainly a
staggering revelation. Peter the Great would have been shocked; Byron
would have been horrified; Don Juan would have fled from the conference
into a monastery. The respectable men all regarded the marriage ceremony
as a rite which absolved them from the laws of health and temperance;
inaugurated a life-long honeymoon; and placed their pleasures on exactly
the same footing as their prayers. It seemed entirely proper and natural
to them that out of every twenty-four hours of their lives they should
pass eight shut up in one room with their wives alone, and this, not
birdlike, for the mating season, but all the year round and every year.
How they settled even such minor questions as to which party should
decide whether and how much the window should be open and how many
blankets should be on the bed, and at what hour they should go to
bed and get up so as to avoid disturbing one another's sleep, seemed
insoluble questions to me. But the members of the conference did not
seem to mind. They were content to have the whole national housing
problem treated on a basis of one room for two people. That was the
essence of marriage for them.

Please remember, too, that there was nothing in their circumstances to
check intemperance. They were men of business: that is, men for the most
part engaged in routine work which exercized neither their minds nor
their bodies to the full pitch of their capacities. Compared with
statesmen, first-rate professional men, artists, and even with laborers
and artisans as far as muscular exertion goes, they were underworked,
and could spare the fine edge of their faculties and the last few inches
of their chests without being any the less fit for their daily routine.
If I had adopted their habits, a startling deterioration would have
appeared in my writing before the end of a fortnight, and frightened me
back to what they would have considered an impossible asceticism