Getting Married/The Criminology of Marriage

The pathology of marriage involves the possibility of the most horrible crime imaginable: that of the person who, when suffering from contagious disease, forces the conta- gion on another person by an act of violence. Such an act. occurring between unmarried people would, within the mem- ory of persons now living, have exposed the aggressor to the. penalty of death; and it is still punished unmercifully by an extreme term of penal servitude when it occurs, as it some- times does, through the hideous countryside superstition that it effects a cure when the victim is a virgin. Marriage makes this outrage absolutely legal. You may with impunity do to the person to whom you are married what you may not do to the most despised outcast of the streets. And this is. only the extreme instance of the outlawry which our marriage laws effect. In our anxiety to provide for ourselves a little private Alsatia in which we can indulge ourselves as we please without reproach or interference from law, religion, or even conscience (and this is what marriage has come to mean to many of us), we have forgotten that we cannot escape re- straints without foregoing rights; that all the laws that are needed to compel strangers to respect us are equally if not more necessary to compel our husbands and wives to respect us; and that society without law, whether between two or two million persons, means tyranny and slavery. If the incorrigible sentimentalists here raise their little pipe of "Not if they love one another," I tell them, with such patience as is possible, that if they had ever had five minute , experience of love they would know that love is itself a tyranny requiring special safeguards; that people will per- petrate "for the sake of" those they love, exactions and sub- missions that they would never dream of proposing to or suffering from those they dislike or regard with indiffer- ence; that healthy marriages are partnerships of companion- able and affectionate friendship; that cases of chronic life long love, whether sentimental or sensual, ought to be sent to the doctor if not to the executioner; and that honorable men and women, when their circumstances permit it, are so far from desiring to be placed helplessly at one another' mercy that they employ every device the law now admits of, from the most stringent marriage settlements to the employ- ment of separate legal advisers, to neutralize the Alsatian evils of the marriage law.