The Great Experiment

"True love can bring surpassing happiness"... and you see him here explaining the meaning of deep love...

Which of the two sexes is the stronger? History says that woman is weaker than man... but let it be remembered that history also says there were those who believed the sun revolves around the earth. We have long since known the error of that illusory truth; likewise a day will come when the doctrine of woman's weakness and the frailty of her personality will be wiped away.

But we see today among our ladies, even the educated among them, a feeling and conviction of woman's incapacity and deficiency. They refuse, for example, to be attended by women doctors; and there are those who believe in equality and so spend their efforts in proving woman's superiority. This ambition reveals a hidden feeling of inferiority, born of the mistaken belief in man's superiority.

There are, of course, several differences between the sexes, but they are complementary differences that go back neither to superiority nor to deficiency at all. If we take the bodily differences, we see that from the time we are able, as children, to walk, we notice the difference in the way grown-ups treat boys and girls, and thereby we learn too that the two sexes are bodily different, and that it is woman whose part it is to bring forth children — although the modern age makes the husband able to help her during the time of pregnancy. And then the woman appreciates every attention or remark that shows her she is dear and loved in a special way. For in the stage of pregnancy the woman is in a condition that entitles her to feel happiness and pride.

In the old days, mothers used to try to hide the news of their pregnancy from all family and friends until they could no longer hide the manifest truth, and they would reveal it only with shyness and embarrassment. Often the little mothers-to-be refused to go out by day; as for those who had courage enough for that, they would put on a special garment to hide the marks and shape of pregnancy.

Today these special clothes are indeed in use, but they are meant only to beautify the appearance of the expectant lady. What I wish to affirm is this: that despite the vast difference between the biological function of each of the sexes, they are not different but complementary to each other. The greatest example of that is marriage. The function of each of the two spouses in the home may differ, but each of them is as necessary to the other as the anesthetic is necessary to the surgeon. In sexual relations, for example, the task of each of them differs; and in fatherhood and motherhood, the mother becomes responsible for feeding the children and the father and caring for them all, while the father strives to protect his family and provide for it.

In their friendship, however, the husband does not differ from the wife, nor the man from the woman. The care of each for the other's good, and their sincerity in their devotion — all these qualities spring from a love built upon the spirit of equality. This is happiness... and this is the ideal life. And at these two things aim all young couples who meet, fall in love, and agree to live together... under the shade of matrimony. But many of them do so without understanding the spirit of marriage and its true meaning... If you asked them the true aim of marriage, what would they answer?

The aim of marriage has differed down the centuries and across the many classes of society. It began with sexual appetite: man's need of a woman... and woman's of a man... and then the necessity of increasing the number of children, which leads to the importance of building society's foundation stone... I mean the family, in our present day.

People differ in their sexual inclinations, not only from one time to another in the same person, but among different individuals. It is nothing strange to me to hear a man grumble at his wife's slight response to his passion, or a wife complain of the slightness of this inclination in her husband; and I have heard grumbling in the opposite direction too.

Here it is fitting for us to point out that a couple's failure to have children need not be due to her slight response to sexual desire; in the case of sterility we must look for other factors with a stronger bearing upon the absence of children.

I am certain that the acceptance of motherhood and fatherhood is a thing more sacred and more responsible than marriage. In marriage two people bind themselves to each other's fate in full knowledge of what they are deciding. But the choice of parenthood involves the fate of a third person, and this third bond must be studied carefully before entering upon marriage.

It is among the duties of parents to encourage and help each child to develop his personality by himself. This being so, they must think long before marriage whether they accept spending efforts and time, patiently, for the sake of their child.

As for the third side of family life, it is the intellectual side. Similar tastes in the two spouses can be formed by means of reading together and discussing everything of value and benefit. There is a wide field in which the couple can find foundations for intellectual companionship, in the same way in which they could have begun before marriage — I mean sharing books, the radio, the cinema, lectures, plays, trips, and holidays.

It is useful for us to have a far horizon and happy friendships, not through similar tastes alone, but through each one's recounting the news of his experiences in life, so that husband and wife tell over to each other what happened to each of them during the time they were apart.

And marriage can bring surpassing happiness to two persons if they understand the meanings it contains, and if they intend to work together to build a home and a family from which love, affection, and the grace of God shine forth.