by Alfred Adler
It is impossible to have the real intimate devotion of love if we limit our responsibility to five years or regard the marriage as a trial period. If men or women contemplate such an escape, they not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "get-away." We cannot love and be limited. All those very well-meaning and goodhearted people who are trying to find a relief for marriage are on the wrong path. The reliefs they propose would damage and restrict the efforts of couples who were entering marriage; they would make it easier for them to find a way out and to omit the work they should do in the task on which they have decided. I know that there are many difficulties in our social life and that they hinder many people from solving the problem of love and marriage in the right way, even though they would like to solve it. It is not love and marriage, however, that 1 want to sacrifice; I want to sacrifice the difficulties of our social life. We know what characteristics are necessary for a love partnership — to be faithful and true and trustworthy, not to be reserved, not to be self-seeking. . . . You can understand that if a person believes that unfaithfulness is all in the day's work, he is not properly prepared for marriage. It is not even possible to carry through a true comradeship if both partners have agreed to preserve their freedom. This is not comradeship. In comradeship we are not free in every direction. We have bound ourselves to our cooperation.
Let me give an example of how such a private agreement, not adapted to the success of the marriage or the welfare of mankind, can harm both the partners.
I remember a case where a divorced man and a divorced woman married. They were cultivated and intelligent people and hoped very much that their new venture in marriage would be better than the last.
They did not know, however, how their first marriages had come to ruin; they were looking for a right way without having seen their lack of social interest. They professed themselves free-thinkers, and they wished to have an easy marriage in which they would never run the risk of being bored by each other. They proposed, therefore, that each of them should be perfectly free in every direction; they should do whatever they wanted to do, but they should trust each other enough to tell everything that happened. On this point the husband seemed to be more courageous. Whenever he came home he had many gay experiences to tell his wife and she seemed to enjoy them vastly and to be very proud of her husband's successes. She was always intending to begin a flirtation or a love-relation herself; but before she had taken the first step she began to suffer from agoraphobia. She could no longer go out alone; her neurosis kept her to her room; if she took a step beyond the door she was so scared that she was compelled to return. This agoraphobia was a protection against the decision she had made; but there was more to it than this. At last, since she was unable to go out alone, her husband was compelled to stay by her side. You see how the logic of marriage broke through their decision. The husband could no longer be a free-thinker because he must remain with his wife. She herself could make no use of her freedom because she was afraid to go out alone. If this woman were cured, she would be forced to reach a better understanding of marriage, and the husband, too, would have to regard it as a cooperative task. Other mistakes are made at the very beginning of the marriage. A child who has been pampered at home often feels neglected in marriage.
He has not been trained to adapt himself to social life. A pampered child may develop into a great tyrant in marriage; the other partner feels victimized, feels himself in a cage, and begins to resist. It is interesting to observe what happens when two pampered children marry each other.
Each of them is claiming interest and attention and neither can be satisfied. The next step is to look for an escape; one partner begins a flirtation with someone else in the hope of gaining more attention. Some people are incapable of falling in love with one person; they must fall in love with two at the same time. They thus feel free; they can escape from one to the other, and never undertake the full responsibilities of love. Both means neither.
There are other people who invent a romantic, ideal or unattainable love; they can thus luxuriate in their feelings without the necessity of approaching a partner in reality. A high ideal of love can also be used to exclude all possibilities, because no one will be found who can live up to it. Many men, and especially many women, through mistakes in their development, have trained themselves to dislike and reject their sexual role. They have hindered their natural functions and are physically not capable, without treatment, of accomplishing a successful marriage. This is what I have called the Masculine Protest and it is very much provoked by the overvaluation of men in our present culture. If children are left in doubt of their sexual role, they are very apt to feel insecure. So long as the masculine role is taken to be the dominant role, it is natural that they should feel, whether they are boys or girls, that the masculine role is enviable. They will doubt their own ability to fulfill this role, will overstress the importance of being manly, and will try to avoid being put to the test. This dissatisfaction with the sexual role is very frequent in our culture. We can suspect it in all cases of frigidity in women and psychic impotence in men. In these cases there is a resistance to love and marriage and a resistance in the right place. It is impossible to avoid these failures unless we truly have the feeling that men and women are equal; and so long as one half of the human race has reason to be dissatisfied with the position accorded to it, we shall have a very great obstacle to the success of marriage. The remedy here is training for equality; and we should never permit children to remain ambiguous about their own future role.
I believe that the intimate devotion of love and marriage is best secured if there have not been sexual relations before the marriage. I have found that secretly most men do not really like it if their sweetheart is able to give herself before marriage. Sometimes they regard it as a sign of easy virtue and are shocked by it. Moreover, in this state of our culture, if there are intimate relations before marriage the burden is heavier for the girl. It is also a great mistake if a marriage is contracted out of fear and not out of courage. We can understand that courage is one side of cooperation and if men and women choose their partners out of fear it is a sign that they do not wish for a real cooperation. This also holds good when they choose partners who are drunkards or very far below them in social status or in education. They are afraid of love and marriage and wish to establish a situation in which their partner will look up to them.
One of the ways in which social interest can be trained is through friendship. We learn in friendship to look with the eyes of another person, to listen with his ears and to feel with his heart. If a child is frustrated, if he is always watched and guarded, if he grows up isolated, without comrades and friends, he does not develop this ability to identify himself with another person. He always thinks himself the most important being in the world and is always anxious to secure his own welfare. Training in friendship is a preparation for marriage. Garnes might be useful if they were regarded as a training in cooperation; but in children's games we find too often competition and the desire to excel. It is very useful to establish situations in which two children work together, study together and learn together. I believe that we should not undervalue dancing. Dancing is a type of activity in which two people have to accomplish a common task, and I think it is good for children to be trained in dancing. I do not exactly mean the dancing we have to-day, where we have more of a show than of a common task. If, however, we had simple and easy dances for children, it would be a great help for their development.
Another problem which also helps to show us the preparation for marriage is the problem of occupation. To-day the solution of this problem is put before the solution of love and marriage. One partner, or both, must be occupied so that they can earn their living and support a family and we can understand that the right preparation for marriage includes also the right preparation for work.
We can always find the degree of courage and the degree o
f capacity to cooperate in the approach to the other sex. Every individual has his characteristic approach, his characteristic gait and temperament in wooing; and this is always congruous with his style of life. In this amative temperament we can see whether he says " Yes " to the future of mankind, is confident and cooperative; or is interested only in his own person, suffers from stage fright, and tortures himself with the question, “What sort of a show am I making? What do they think of me?”
A man may be slow and cautious in wooing, or rash and precipitate; in any case, his amative temperament fits in with his goal and his style of life, and is only one expression of it. We cannot judge a man's fitness for marriage entirely by his courtship; for there he has a direct goal before him and in other ways he may be indecisive. Nevertheless we can gather from it sure indications of his personality.
In our own cultural conditions (and only in these conditions) it is generally expected that the man should be the first to express attraction, that the man should make the first approach. So long as this cultural demand exists, therefore, it is necessary to train boys in the masculine attitude — to take the initiative, not to hesitate or look for an escape.
They can be trained, however, only if they feel themselves to be a part of the whole social life and accept its advantages and disadvantages as their own. Of course, girls and women are also engaged in wooing, they also take the initiative; but in our prevailing cultural conditions, they feel obliged to be more reserved, and their wooing is expressed in their whole gait and person, in the way they dress, the way they look, speak and listen. A man's approach, therefore, may be called simpler and shallower, a woman's deeper and more complicated.
We can now advance a step farther. The sexual attraction towards the other partner is necessary but it should always be molded along the line of a desire for human welfare. If the partners are really interested in each other, there will never be the difficulty of sexual attraction coming to an end. This stop implies always a lack of interest; it tells us that the individual no longer feels equal, friendly and cooperative towards his partner, no longer wishes to enrich the life of his partner. People may think, sometimes, that the interest continues but the attraction has ceased. This is never true. Sometimes the mouth lies or the head does not understand; but the functions of the body always speak the truth. If the functions are deficient, it follows that there is no true agreement between these two people. They have lost interest in each other. One of them, at least, no longer wishes to solve the task of love and marriage but is looking for an evasion and escape.
In one other way the sex drive in human beings is different from the sex drive among other beings. It is continuous. This is another way in which the welfare and continuance of mankind is guaranteed; it is a way by which mankind can increase, become numerous, and secure its welfare and survival by the greatness of its numbers. In other creatures life has taken other means to ensure this survival: in many, for example, we find the females produce a very great number of eggs which never come to maturity. Many of them get lost or destroyed but the great number secures that some of them always survive. With men, also, one method of surviving is to have children. We shall find, therefore, that in this problem of love and marriage those people who are most spontaneously interested in the welfare of mankind are the most likely to have children, and those who are not interested, consciously or unconsciously, in their fellow beings, refuse the burden of procreation. If they are always demanding and expecting, never giving, they do not like children.
They are interested in only their own persons and they regard children as a bother, a trouble, a nuisance; something that will prevent them from keeping their interest in themselves. We can say, therefore, that for a full solution of the problem of love and marriage a decision to have children is necessary. A good marriage is the best means we know for bringing up the future generation of mankind, and marriage should always have this in view.
The solution of the problem of love and marriage in our practical and social life is monogamy. Anyone who starts the relation which demands such an intimate devotion, such an interest in another person, cannot shake the fundamental basis of this relation and search for an escape. We know that there is the possibility that there will be a break in the relation. Unfortunately we cannot always avoid it: but it is easiest to avoid if we are regarding marriage and love as a social task which confronts us, a task which we are expected to solve. We shall then try every means to solve the problem.
These breaks generally happen because the partners are not collecting all their powers: they are not creating the marriage: they are only waiting to receive something. If they face the problem in this way, of course they will fail before it. It is a mistake to regard love and marriage as if they were a paradise; and it is a mistake, too, to regard marriage as if it were the end of a story. It is when two people are married that the possibilities of their relationship begin; it is during marriage that they are faced with the real talks of life and the real opportunity to create for the sake of society. The other point of view, the point of view of marriage as an end, as a final goal, is very much too prominent in our culture. We can see it, for example, in thousands of novels, in which we are left with a man and a woman, just married, and really at the beginning of their life together. Yet the situation is often treated as if marriage itself had solved everything satisfactorily: as if they were at the end of their task. Another point important to realize is that love by itself does not settle everything. There are all kinds of love, and it is better to rely upon work, interest, and cooperation to solve the problems of marriage.
There is nothing at all miraculous in this whole relationship. The attitude of every individual towards marriage is one of the expressions of his style of life: we can understand it if we understand the whole individual, not unless. It is coherent with all his efforts and aims. We shall be able to find out, therefore, why so many people are always looking for a relief or escape. I can tell exactly how many people have this attitude: all the people who remain pampered children. This is a dangerous type in our social life — these grown-up pampered children whose style of life has been fixed in the first four or five years of life and who always have the scheme of apperception: "Can I get all I want?” If they can't get everything that they want, they think life is purposeless. "What is the use of living," they ask, “if I cannot have what I want?”
They become pessimistic: they conceive a "death wish." They make themselves sick and neurotic and out of their mistaken style of life they construct a philosophy. They feel that their mistaken ideas are of unique and tremendous importance: they feel that it is a piece of spite on the part of the universe if they have to repress their drives and emotions. They are trained in this way. Once they experienced a favorable time in which they obtained everything they wanted. Some of them, perhaps, still feel that if they cry long enough, if they protest enough, if they refuse cooperation, they will obtain their own desires. They do not look to the coherence of life but to their own personal interests. The result is they do not want to contribute, they always wish to have things easy, they want to be refused nothing; and, therefore, marriage itself they wish to have on trial or return, they want companionate marriages, trial marriages, easier divorces: at the very beginning of marriage they demand freedom and a right to unfaithfulness. Now if one human being is really interested in another, he must have all the characteristics belonging to that interest; he must be true, a good friend; he must feel responsible, he must make himself faithful and trustworthy. I believe that at the least a human being who has not succeeded in accomplishing such a love life or such a marriage should understand that on this point his life has been a mistake. It is necessary, too, to be interested in the welfare of the children; and if a marriage is based upon different outlooks from the one I have supported, there are great difficulties for the bringing up of children. If the parents quarrel and look on their marriage as a trifle, if they do not see it as if its problems could be solved and th
e relationship could be continued successfully, it is not a very favorable situation for helping the children to be sociable.
Probably there are reasons why people should not live together; probably there are cases where it would be better that they should be apart. Who should decide the case? Are we going to put it in the hands of people who themselves are not rightly taught, who themselves do not understand that marriage is a task, who themselves are interested only in their own persons? They would look at divorce in the same way as they look at marriage: "What can be got out of it?” These are obviously not the people to decide. You will see very often that people divorce and remarry again and again and always make the same mistake. Then who ought to decide? Perhaps we might imagine that if something is wrong with a marriage, a psychiatrist should decide whether or not it should be broken. There is difficulty there. I do not know whether it holds true of America, but in Europe I have found that psychiatrists for the most part think that personal welfare is the most important point. Generally, therefore, if they are consulted in such a case, they recommend a sweetheart or a lover and think that this might be the way to solve the problem. I am sure that in time they will change their mind and cease to give such advice. They can only propose such a solution if they have not been rightly trained in the whole coherence of the problem, the way it hangs together with the other tasks of our life on this earth; and it is this coherence that I have been wishing to offer for your consideration.
A similar mistake is made when people look upon marriage as a solution for a personal problem. Here again I cannot speak of America, but I know that in Europe, if a boy or girl becomes neurotic, psychiatrists often advise them to have sweethearts and to begin sex relations. They advise adults, also, in the same way. This is really making love and marriage into a mere patent medicine, and these individuals are bound to lose very greatly. The right solution of the problem of love and marriage belongs to the highest fulfillment of the whole personality. There is no problem more closely involved with happiness and a true and useful expression in life. We cannot treat it as a trifle. We cannot look on love and marriage as a remedy for a criminal career, for drunkenness or neurosis. A neurotic needs to have the right treatment before he is fitted for love and marriage; and if he enters them before he is capable of approaching them rightly, he is bound to run into new dangers and misfortunes. Marriage is too high an ideal and the solution of the task demands too much of our effort and creative activity for us to load it with such additional burdens.