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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