Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/138

122 This last is, indeed, the only correct principle as far as the two married persons are concerned. For marriage is nothing more nor less than a free union of two persons who love each other and who, just because they love each other, find in this union the satisfaction of their emotional and sexual needs. Without love, without harmony, without mutual indispensability, no marriage is possible; with these, it needs not the protection of the law, which is an offence, a humiliation to it. A contract binds the contracting parties to mutual obligations which conform to its aim and are within the reach of possibility; but no person can put himself under an obligation to love, for that is a matter of taste, the gratification of which does not depend on the will of the person who has thus bound himself. A man whom a woman loves passionately to-day can have become an object of disgust to her a year hence. Shall she continue to love him [sic]acccording to contract, or shall she sacrifice herself to the contract? The conception of a contract in marriage presupposes the possibility of forcing a person to fulfil the condition on which the life of marriage depends, which is love. For no marriage is made by a merely forced living together, by forced economic communism without love; otherwise the mere imprisonment together of two persons of different sex would be a marriage.

Married people who no longer love each other, no