ar Between the Sexes

6. How Marriages are Arranged

I have said that women are not sentimental, i.e., not prone to permit
mere emotion and illusion to corrupt their estimation of a situation.
The doctrine, perhaps, will raise a protest. The theory that they are is
itself a favourite sentimentality; one sentimentality will be brought
up to substantiate another; dog will eat dog. But an appeal to a few
obvious facts will be enough to sustain my contention, despite the vast
accumulation of romantic rubbish to the contrary.

Turn, for example, to the field in which the two sexes come most
constantly into conflict, and in which, as a result, their habits of
mind are most clearly contrasted--to the field, to wit, of monogamous
marriage. Surely no long argument is needed to demonstrate the superior
competence and effectiveness of women here, and therewith their greater
self-possession, their saner weighing of considerations, their higher
power of resisting emotional suggestion. The very fact that marriages
occur at all is a proof, indeed, that they are more cool-headed than
men, and more adept in employing their intellectual resources, for it is
plainly to a man's interest to avoid marriage as long as possible, and
as plainly to a woman's interest to make a favourable marriage as soon
as she can. The efforts of the two sexes are thus directed, in one of
the capital concerns of life, to diametrically antagonistic ends. Which
side commonly prevails? I leave the verdict to the jury. All normal
men fight the thing off; some men are successful for relatively long
periods; a few extraordinarily intelligent and courageous men (or
perhaps lucky ones) escape altogether. But, taking one generation with
another, as every one knows, the average man is duly married and the
average woman gets a husband. Thus the great majority of women, in
this clear-cut and endless conflict, make manifest their substantial
superiority to the great majority of men.

Not many men, worthy of the name, gain anything of net value by
marriage, at least as the institution is now met with in Christendom.
Even assessing its benefits at their most inflated worth, they are
plainly overborne by crushing disadvantages. When a man marries it is
no more than a sign that the feminine talent for persuasion and
intimidation--i.e., the feminine talent for survival in a world
of clashing concepts and desires, the feminine competence and
intelligence--has forc