real
hardship. Independence and self-reliance are the basis of self-respect
and self-control.

At the same time this habit of independence, especially if it is
ingrained by years of single life, tends to perpetuate itself in ways
that are injurious to the highest domestic and family life. Independence
is a magnificent foundation for marriage; to carry it up above the
foundation, and build the main structure out of it, is fatal. The
insistence on rights, the urging of claims, the enforcement of private
whims and fancies, are the death of love and the destruction of the
family. Unless one is ready to give everything, asking nothing save what
love gives freely in return, marriage will prove a fountain of
bitterness rather than of sweetness; a region of storm and tempest
rather than a haven of repose. Within a bond so close and all-embracing
there is no room for the independent life of separated selves. Each must
lose self in the other; both must merge themselves in devotion to a
common good; or the bond becomes a fetter, and the home a prison. Unless
one is prepared to give all to the object of his love, duty to self, to
the object of his affections, and to the blessed state of marriage
demands that he should offer nothing, and remain outside a relation
which his whole self cannot enter. Independence outside of marriage is
respectable and honorable. Independence and self-assertion in marriage
toward husband or wife is mean and cruel. It is the attempt to partake
of that in which we refuse to participate; to claim the advantages of an
organism in which we refuse to comply with the conditions of membership.
Not admiration, nor fascination, nor sentimentality, nor flattered
vanity can bind two hearts together in life-long married happiness. For
these are all forms of self-seeking in disguise. Love alone, love that
loses self in its object; love that accepts service with gladness and
transmutes sacrifice into a joy; simple, honest, self-forgetful love
must be the light and life of marriage, or else it will speedily go out
in darkness and expire in death.

Of the deliberate seeking of external ends in marriage, such as money,
position, family connections, and the like, it ought not to be necessary
to say a word to any thoughtful person. It is the basest act of which
man or woman is capable. It is an insult to marriage; it is a mockery of
love; it is treachery and falsehood and robbery toward the person
married. It subordinate