The cruel madness of love
     The honey of poisonous flowers.

There is no madness or cruelty in conjugal love:  in its normal state it is all peace, contentment, happiness, while romantic love, in its normal state, is chiefly unrest, doubt, fear, anxiety, torture and anguish of heart—­with alternating hours of frantic elation—­until the Yes has been spoken.

The emotions of a husband are those of a mariner who has entered into the calm harbor of matrimony with his treasure safe and sound, while the romantic lover is as one who is still on the high seas of uncertainty, storm-tossed one moment, lifted sky-high on a wave of hope, the next in a dark abyss of despair.  It is indeed lucky that conjugal affection does differ so widely from romantic love; such nervous tension, doubt, worry, and constant friction between hope and despair would, if continued after marriage, make life a burden to the most loving couples.

WHY SAVAGES VALUE WIVES

The notion that genuine romantic love does not undergo a metamorphosis in marriage is the first of five mistakes I have undertaken to correct in this chapter.  The second is summed up in Westermarck’s assertion (359-60) that it is

“impossible to believe that there ever was a time when conjugal affection was entirely wanting in the human race ... it seems, in its most primitive form, to have been as old as marriage itself.  It must be a certain degree of affection that induces the male to defend the female during her period of pregnancy.”

Now I concede that natural selection must have developed at an early period in the history of man, as in the lower animals, some kind of an attachment between male and females.  A wife could not seek her daily food in the forest and at the same time defend herself and her helpless babe against wild beasts and human enemies.  Hence natural selection favored those groups in which the males attached themselves to a particular female for a longer time than the breeding-season, defending her from enemies and giving her a share of their game.  But from this admitted fact to the inference that it is “affection” that makes the husband defend his wife, there is a tremendous logical skip not warranted by the situation.  Instead of making such an assumption offhand, the scientific method requires us to ask if there is not some other way of accounting for the facts more in accordance with the selfish disposition and habits of savages.  The solution of the problem is easily found.  A savage’s wife is his property, which he has acquired by barter, service, fighting, or purchase, and which he would be a fool not to protect against injury or rivals.  She is to him a source of utility, comfort, and pleasure, which is reason enough why he should not allow a lion to devour her or a rival to carry her off.  She is his cook, his slave, his mule; she fetches wood and water, prepares the food, puts up the camp, and when it is time to move carries the tent and kitchen utensils, as well as her child to the next place.  If his motive in protecting her against men and beasts were affection, he would not thus compel her to do all the work while he walks unburdened to the next camping-place.