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.