Walter Lippmann on love and marriage

    Young people -- Do you think the one you love is the only possible one for you? As they say, there are many fish in the sea -- a sensible reason for postponing marriage, thereby building a big pile of money, avoiding the quick, quick, quick having of three or more children before you are thirty, with you unable to give each a top college education, $400,000 apiece. Listen to Walter Lippmann:

The wisdom of marriage rests upon an extremely unsentimental view of lovers and their passions. Its assumptions, when they are frankly exposed, are horrifying to those who have been brought up in the popular romantic tradition of the Nineteenth Century. These assumptions are that, given an initial attraction, a common social background, common responsibilities, and the conviction that the relationship is permanent, compatibility in marriage can normally be achieved. It is precisely this that the prevailing sentimentality about love denies. It assumes that marriages are made in heaven, that compatibility is instinctive, a mere coincidence, that happy unions are, in the last analysis, lucky accidents in which two people who happen to suit each other happen to have met. The convention of marriage rests on an interpretation of human nature which does not confuse the subjective feeling of the lovers that their passion is unique, with the brutal but objective fact that, had they never met, each of them would in all probability have found a lover who was just as unique. “Love,” says Mr. Santayana, “is indeed much less exacting than it thinks itself. Nine-tenths of its cause are in the lover, for one-tenth that may be in the object. Were the latter not accidently at hand, an almost identical passion would probably have been felt for some one else; for, although with acquaintance the quality of an attachment naturally adapts itself to the person loved, and makes that person its standard and ideal, the first assault and mysterious glow of the passion is much the same for every object.”

    (Quoted from page 309-310 of A Preface to Morals, by Walter Lippmann. The Macmillian Company, 1929.)
    For a brief autobiography of Walter Lippmann, click here. For images of or relating to Walter Lippmann, click here. For a brief autobiography of George Santayana, click here. For images of or relating to George Santayana, click here.