by Alfred Adler
If he can be a good friend to all men and contribute to them by useful work and by a happy marriage, he will never feel inferior to others or defeated by them. He will feel that he is at home in the universe, in a friendly place, meeting people he likes and equal to all his difficulties.
He will feel, “This world is my world. I must act and organize, not wait and expect." He will be wholly sure that the present time is only one time in the history of mankind, and that he belongs to the whole human process,— past, present and future; but he will feel also that this is the time in which he can fulfill his creative tasks and make his own contribution to human development. It is true that there are evils and difficulties and prejudices and disasters in this world; but it is our own world and its advantages and disadvantages are our own. It is our world to work in and improve and we can hope that if any one takes up his tasks in the right way he can do his part in improving it.
To take up his tasks means to assume responsibility for solving the three problems of life in a cooperative way. All that we demand of a human being, and the highest praise that we can give him, is that he should be a good fellow worker, a friend to all other men, and a true Partner in love and marriage. If we are to put it in a word, we may say that he should prove himself a fellow man.
XII. LOVE AND MARRIAGE
In a certain district of Germany there is an old custom for testing whether an engaged couple are suited for married life together. Before the wedding ceremony, the bride and bridegroom are brought to a clearing where a tree trunk has been cut down. Here they are given a two-handed saw and set to work to saw the trunk across. By this test it is found out how far they are willing to cooperate with each other. It is a task for two people. If there is no trust between them, they will tug against each other and accomplish nothing. If one of them wishes to take the lead and do everything by himself, then, even if the other gives way, the task will take twice as long. They must both have initiative, but their initiatives must combine together. These German villagers have recognized that cooperation is the chief prerequisite for marriage. If I were asked to say what love and marriage mean, I should give the following definition, incomplete as it may be:
"Love, with its fulfillment, marriage, is the most intimate devotion towards a partner of the other sex, expressed in physical attraction, in comradeship, and in the decision to have children. It can easily be shown that love and marriage are one side of cooperation — not a cooperation for the welfare of two persons only, but a cooperation also for the welfare of mankind."
This standpoint, that love and marriage are a cooperation for the welfare of mankind, throws light on every aspect of the problem. Even physical attraction, the most important of all human strivings, has been a most necessary development for mankind. As I have explained so often, mankind, suffering from imperfect organs, has been none too well equipped for life on the crust of this poor planet, earth. The chief way to preserve human life was to propagate it; hence our fertility and the continual striving of physical attraction.
In our own days, we find difficulties and dissensions arising over all the problems of love. Married couples are confronted with these difficulties, parents are concerned with them, the whole of society is involved in them. If we are trying, therefore, to come to a right conclusion, our approach must be quite without prejudice. We must forget what we have learned and try to investigate, as far as we can, without letting other considerations interfere with a full and free discussion.
I do not mean that we can judge the problem of love and marriage as if it were an entirely isolated problem. A human being can never be wholly free in this way: he can never reach solutions for his problems purely along the line of his private ideas. Every human being is bound by definite ties; his development takes place within a definite framework and he must conform his decisions to this framework. These three main ties are set by the facts that we are living in one particular place in the universe and must develop with the limits and possibilities which our circumstances set us; that we are living among others of our own kind to whom we must learn to adapt ourselves; and that we are living in two sexes with the future of our race dependent on the relations of these two sexes.
It is easy to understand that if an individual is interested in his fellows and in the welfare of mankind, everything he does will be guided by the interests of his fellows, and he will try to solve the problem of love and marriage as if the welfare of others were involved. He does not need to know that he is trying to solve it in this way. If you ask him, he will perhaps be unable to give a scientific account of his aims. But he will spontaneously seek the welfare and improvement of mankind and this interest will be visible in all his activities.
There are other human beings who are not so much concerned with the welfare of mankind. Instead of taking as their underlying view of life "What can I contribute to my fellows?” "How can I fit in as part of the whole?”, they ask rather, “What is the use of life? What can I get out of it? What does it pay? Are other people considering me enough? Am I properly appreciated?” If this attitude is behind an individual's approach to life, he will try to solve the problem of love and marriage in the same way. He will ask always: "What can I get out of it?” Love is not a purely natural task, as some psychologists believe.
Sex is a drive or instinct; but the question of love and marriage is not quite simply how we are to satisfy this drive. Wherever we look, we find that our drives and instincts are developed, cultivated, refined. We have repressed some of our desires and inclinations. On behalf of our fellow beings, we have learned how not to annoy each other. We have learned how to dress ourselves and how to be clean. Even our hunger does not have a merely natural outlet; we have cultivated tastes and manners in eating. Our drives have all been adapted to our common culture; they all reflect the efforts we have learned to make for the welfare of mankind and for our life in association.
If we apply this understanding to the problem of love and marriage we shall see, here again, that the interest of the whole, the interest in mankind, must always be involved. This interest is primary.
There is no advantage in discussing any of the aspects of love and marriage, in proposing reliefs, changes, new regulations or institutions, before we have seen that the problem can be solved only in its whole coherence, only by considering human welfare as a whole. Perhaps we shall improve; perhaps we shall find completer answers to the problem; but if we find better answers they will be better because they take fuller account of the fact that we are living in two sexes, on the crust of this earth, where association is necessary. In so far as our answers already take account of these conditions, the truth in them can stand for ever.
When we use this approach, our first finding in the love problem is that it is a task for two individuals. For many people this is bound to be a new task. To some degree we have been educated to work alone; to some degree we have been educated to work in a team or a crowd. We have generally had little experience of working two by two. These new conditions, therefore, raise a difficulty; but it is a difficulty easier to solve if these two people have been interested in their fellows, for then they can learn more easily to be interested in each other. We could even say that for a full solution of this cooperation of two, each partner must be more interested in the other than in himself.
This is the only basis on which love and marriage can be successful. We shall already be able to see in what way many opinions of marriage and many proposals for its reform are mistaken. If each partner is to be more interested in the other partner than in himself, there must be equality. If there is to be so intimate a devotion, neither partner can feel subdued nor overshadowed. Equality is only possible if both partners have this attitude. It should be the effort of each to ease and enrich the life of the other. In this way each is safe. Each feels that he is worthwhile: each feels that he is needed. Here we find the fundamental guarantee of marriage, the fundamental meaning of happiness in this relation. It is the feeling th
at you are worthwhile, that you cannot be replaced, that your partner needs you, that you are acting well, that you are a fellow man and a true friend.
It is not possible for a partner in a cooperative task to accept a position of subservience. Two people cannot live together fruitfully if one wishes to rule and force the other to obey. In our present conditions many men and, indeed, many women are convinced that it is the man's part to rule and dictate, to play the leading role, to be the master. This is the reason why we have so many unhappy marriages. Nobody can bear a position of inferiority without anger and disgust. Comrades must be equal, and when people are equal, they will always find a way to settle their difficulties. They will agree, for example, in questions of having children. They know that a decision for sterility involves their own part in giving a pledge for the future of mankind.
They will agree in questions of education; and they will be stimulated to solve their problems as they occur, because they know that the children of unhappy marriages are penalized and cannot develop well. In our present-day civilization people are not often well prepared for cooperation. Our training has been too much towards individual success, towards considering what we can get out of life rather than what we can give to it. It will be easily understood that where we get two people living together in the intimate way which marriage demands, any failure in cooperation, in the ability to be interested in somebody else, will have the gravest results. Most people are experiencing this close relationship for the first time. They are unaccustomed to consulting another human being's interests and aims, desires, hopes and ambitions.
They are not prepared for the Problems of a common tack. We need not be surprised at the many mistakes which we see around us; but we can examine the facts and learn how to avoid mistakes in the future. No crisis of adult life is met without previous training: we always respond in conformity with our style of living. The preparation for marriage is not overnight. In a child's characteristic behavior, in his attitudes, thoughts and actions, we can see how he is training himself for adult situations. In its main features his approach to love is already established by the fifth or sixth year.
Early in the development of a child we can see that he is already forming his outlook on love and marriage. We should not imagine that he is showing sexual promptings in our adult sense of the term. He is making up his mind about one aspect of the general social life of which he feels himself a part. Love and marriage are factors of his environment: they enter into his conception of his own future. He must have some comprehension of them, take up some stand about these problems. When children give such early evidence of their interest in the other sex and choose for themselves the partners whom they like, we should never interpret it as a mistake, or a nuisance, or a precocious sex influence. Still less should we deride it or make a joke of it. We should take it as a step forward in their preparation for love and marriage.
Instead of making a trifle out of it, we should rather agree with the child that love is a marvelous task, a task for which he should be prepared, a task on behalf of the whole of mankind. Thus we can implant an ideal in the child's mind, and later in life children will be able to meet each other as very well-prepared comrades and as friends in an intimate devotion. It is revealing to observe that children are spontaneous and wholehearted adherents of monogamy; and this often in spite of the fact that the marriages of their parents are not always harmonious and happy.
I should never encourage parents to explain the physical relations of sex too early in life or to explain more than their children wish to learn. You can understand that the way in which a child looks on the problems of marriage is of the greatest importance. If he is taught in a mistaken way, he can see them as a danger or as something altogether beyond him. In my own experience children who were introduced to the facts of adult relations in early life, at four, five or six years of age, and children who had precocious experiences, are always more scared of love in later life. Bodily attraction suggests to them also the idea of danger. If a child is more grown-up when he has his first explanations and experiences, he is not nearly so frightened: there is so much less opportunity for him to make mistakes in understanding the right relations. The key to helpfulness is never to lie to a child, never to evade his questions, to understand what is behind his questions, to explain only as much as he wishes to learn and only as much as we are sure he can understand. Officious and intrusive information can cause great harm. In this problem of life, as in all others, it is better for a child to be independent and learn what he wants to know by his own efforts. If there is trust between himself and his parents he can suffer no injury. He will always ask what he needs to know. There is a common superstition that children can be misled by the explanations of their comrades. I have never seen a child, otherwise healthy, who suffered harm in this way.
Children do not swallow everything that their schoolmates tell them: for the most part they are very critical, and, if they are not certain that what they have been told is true, they will ask their parents or their brothers and sisters. I must confess, too, that I have often found children more delicate and tactful in these affairs than their elders.
Even the physical attraction of adult life is already being trained in childhood. The impressions the child gains with regard to sympathy and attraction, the impressions given by the members of the other sex in his immediate surroundings — these are the beginnings of physical attraction. When a boy gains these impressions from his mother, his sisters, or the girls around him, his selection of physically attractive types in later life will be influenced by their similarity to these members of his earlier environment. Sometimes he is influenced, also, by the creations of art: everybody is drawn in this way by an ideal of personal beauty. Thus in later life the individual has no longer a free choice in the broadest sense but a choice only along the lines of his training. This search for beauty is not a meaningless search. Our aesthetic emotions are always based on a feeling for health and for the improvement of mankind. All our functions, all our abilities, are formed in this direction.
We cannot escape it. We know as beautiful those things which look towards eternity, those things which are for the benefit of mankind and for the future of mankind; the symbols of the way in which we wish our children to develop. This is the beauty which is always drawing us.
Sometimes if a boy experiences difficulties with his mother, and a girl with her father (as happens often if the cooperation in marriage is not firm), they look for an antithetic type. If, for example, the boy's mother has nagged him and bullied him, if he is weak and afraid of being dominated, he may find sexually attractive only those women who appear not to be dominating. It is easy for him to make mistakes: he can look for a partner whom he can subdue, and a happy marriage is never possible without equality. Sometimes, if he wants to prove himself powerful and strong, he looks for a partner who also seems to be strong, either because he prefers strength or because he finds in her more of a challenge to prove his own strength. If his disagreement with his mother is very great, his preparation for love and marriage may be hindered and even physical attraction to the other sex may be blocked. There are many degrees of this obstruction; where it is complete he will exclude the other sex entirely and become perverted.
We are always better prepared if the marriage of our parents has been harmonious. Children gain their earliest impression of what marriage is like from the life of their parents; and it is not astonishing that the greatest number of failures in life are among the children of broken marriages and unhappy family life. If the parents are not able themselves to cooperate, it will be impossible for them to teach cooperation to their children. We can often best consider the fitness of an individual for marriage by learning whether he was trained in the right kind of family life and by observing his attitude towards his parents, sisters and brothers. The important factor is where he gained his preparation for love and marriage. We must be careful on this point, however. We know that a man is not de
termined by his environment but by the estimate he makes of his environment. His estimate can be useful. It is possible that he had very unhappy experiences of family life in his parents' home but this may only stimulate him to do better in his own family life. He may be striving to prepare himself well for marriage. We must never judge or exclude a human being because he has an unfortunate family life behind him.
The worst preparation is when an individual is always looking for his own interest. If he has been trained in this way, he will be thinking all the while what pleasure or excitement he can get out of life. He will always be demanding freedom and reliefs, never considering how he can ease and enrich the life of his partner. This is a disastrous approach. I should compare him to a man who tries to put a horse's collar on from the tail end. It is not a sin, but it is a mistaken method. In preparing our attitude to love, therefore, we should not always be looking for mitigations and ways of avoiding responsibility. The comradeship of love could not be firm if there were hesitation and doubt. Cooperation demands a decision for eternity; and we only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. In this decision we include the decision to have children, to educate them and train them in cooperation, and to make them, as far as we can, real fellow men, real equal and responsible members of the human race. A good marriage is the best means we have for bringing up the future generation of mankind; and marriage should always have this in view. Marriage is really a task; it has its own rules and laws; we cannot select one part and evade the others without infringing the eternal law of this earth crust, cooperation.