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THE EIGHTH YEAR

A Vital Problem Of Married Life

By Philip Gibbs

New York

The Devin-Adair Company 437 Fifth Avenue

1913

“_The Eighth Year is the most dangerous year in the adventure of
marriage._”

Sir Francis Jeune (afterwards Lord St. Helier). President of the Divorce
Court.





PART I--THE ARGUMENT




CHAPTER I

It was Sir Francis Jeune, afterwards Lord St. Helier, and President
of the Divorce Court, who first called attention to the strange
significance of the Eighth Year of married life. “The Eighth Year,” he
said, “is the most dangerous year in the adventure of marriage.”

Afterwards, in the recent Royal Commission on Divorce, this curious
fact was again alluded to in the evidence, and it has been shown by
statistics of domestic tragedy, by hundreds of sordid little dramas,
that at this period in the partnership of husbands and wives there
comes, in many cases, a great crisis, leading often to moral disaster.

It is in the Eighth Year, or thereabouts, that there is the tug-of-war
between two temperaments, mated by the law, but not mated, perhaps, in
ideals, in ambitions, or in qualities of character. The man and woman
pull against each other, tugging at each other’s heartstrings. The
Eighth Year is the fatal year, when if there is no give-and-take, no
working compromise, no new pledges of loyalty and comradeship, the
foundations of the home are shattered, and the hopes with which it was
first built lie in ruins like a house of cards knocked down by a gust of
wind.

But why the Eighth Year? Why not the twelfth, fourteenth, or eighteenth
year? The answer is not to be found in any old superstition. There
is nothing uncanny about the number eight. The problem is not to be
shrugged off by people who despise the foolish old tradition which
clings to thirteen, and imagine this to be in the same class of folly.
By the law of averages and by undeniable statistics it has been proved
that it brings many broken-hearted men and women to the Divorce Court.
For instance, taking the annual average of divorces in England between
1904 and 1908, one finds that there were only six divorces between
husbands and wives who had been married less than a year, and only
eighteen divorces between those married less than two years. Between
the second and the fifth years the number increases to a hundred and
seventeen. Then there is a tremendous jump, and the numbers between the
fifth and tenth years are two hundred and ninety-two. The period of
the Eighth Year is the most productive of divorce. The figures are more
startling and more significant when they cover a longer period. But
apart from statistics and apart altogether from the Divorce Court,
which is only one house of trouble, by using one’s own eyes in one’s
own circle of friends one may see that young married couples who started
happily enough show signs of stress and strain as this year approaches.
The fact is undeniable. What is the cause behind the fact?

There is not one cause, there are many causes, all leading up from
the first day of marriage, inevitably, with the unswerving, relentless
fatality of Greek Tragedy to the Eighth Year. They are causes which lie
deep in the social system of our modern home life; in the little order
of things prevailing, at this time, in hundreds of thousands of small
households and small flats, inhabited by the middle-classes. It is
mainly a middle-class problem, because the rich and the poor are, for
reasons which I will show later in this argument, exempt in a large
measure from the fatality of the Eighth Year. But all the influences
at work among the middle-classes, in this strange age of intellectual
disturbance, and of blind gropings forward to new social and moral
conditions, have a close hearing upon this seeming mystery. The
economic position of this class, its social ambitions, its intellectual
adventures, its general education, its code of morality, its religion or
lack of religion, its little conventional cults, the pressure of outside
influences, thrusting inwards to the hidden life in these little
homes, bringing dangerous ideas through the front doors, or through the
keyholes, and all the mental and moral vibrations that are “in the
air” to-day, especially in the air breathed by the middle-classes,
produce--the Eighth Year.

Let us start with the first year of marriage so that we may see how the
problem works out from the beginning.

Here we have, in