From "On Marriage"
by Robert Louis Stevenson
There is probably no other act in a man (or woman)'s life so hot-headed
or foolhardy as this one of marriage. For years, let us suppose, you have
been making the most indifferent business of your career....You have seen
and desired the good that you were not able to accomplish...you have waked
at night...remembering, with dismal surprise, your own unpardonable acts
and sayings....You have fallen back upon the thought that you yourself most
sharply smarted for your misdemeanors, or, in the old, plaintive phrase,
that you were nobody's enemy but your own....Granted, and with all my heart.
Let us accept these apologies...But there is one thing to which, on these
terms, we can never agree:--we can never agree to have you marry.
What! you have had one life to manage, and have failed so strangely, and
now can see nothing wiser than to conjoin it with the management of someone
else's?...
And goodness in marriage is a more intricate problem than mere single virtue;
for in marriage there are two ideals to be realized....It is better to face
the fact, and know, when you marry, that you take into your life a creature
of equal, if of unlike, frailties; whose weak human heart beats no more
tunefully than yours....
And yet, when all has been said, the man who should hold back from marriage
is in the same case with him who runs away from battle. To avoid an occasion
for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily
and make a fall....And the true conclusion of this paper is to turn our
back on apprehensions, and embrace that shining and courageous virtue, Faith.
Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow..; Faith is the grave,
experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is
built upon a knowledge of our life....In the one temper, a man...expects
an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself--erring,
thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling
radiancy of better things...You may safely go to school with hope; but ere
you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that dolls
are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings; that hope and
love address themselves to a perfection never realized, and yet, firmly
held, become the salt and staff of life.
(The entire essay can be found in "The Art of the Personal Essay",
a collection that came out in paperback early in 1995.)
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