Page:The Relations Tolstoy.pdf/50



Every grown individual desirous of living well, should certainly marry; but one should marry by no means from love but from calculation, -understanding these two words however in the precisely opposite sense to that in which they are generally understood. That is to say, one should marry not from sensual love, but from calculation -not of where and how one is to live (we all do manage to live somewhere and somehow) but, -of how far it is likely one's future partner will help or hinder one to live a human life.

... Above all, think twenty times, a hundred times, before marrying. To join one's life with that of another by the sexual link is for a moral sensitive person the most important act and the one most pregnant with consequences, which it is possible to commit. One should always marry in the same way as one dies, i.e., only when it is impossible to do otherwise.

After death, in significance, before death, in time, there is nothing more important, more irrevocable, than marriage. And just as death is only good when it is inevitable, and every intentional death is bad, so also with marriage. Marriage is not an evil only when it is irresistible.

Men who marry when they might avoid it, to my mind resemble those who fall down without previously stumbling... If one has fallen down there is nothing to be done; but why fall on purpose, before being tripped up?