Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1459

1459. No matter how much beings dress up the marital principle and produce wonderful, expensive, colour films and plays with the world's physically most beautiful or handsome people in the principal roles, and no matter how much they allow them to illustrate marital scenes that end in one-hundred-per-cent radiant, marital happiness that continues until the end of the couples' days or the rest of their lives, marriages still cannot last or be strengthened sufficiently to stem the increase in sexual enjoyment outside of marriage. It is true that millions of young couples who are ecstatically in love sit and watch these scenes, and are stimulated by them to believe that they are experiencing the same kind of eternal or "imperishable" happiness. And they therefore cannot seem to get to the priest or the mayor quickly enough in order to have their relationship authorised and blessed by society. And thus a whole series of new marriages are contracted, marriages that are merely the initial preparations for a series of new divorces. For what did the young people see in the film or on the stage? Was it not just the reveries of an ingenious writer about how marital happiness could be, and certainly not the general, absolutely naked reality. The cases of ideal marital happiness that are conjured up on the screen and the stage are merely illustrations of the very small percentage of exceptions to the rule. But a fundamental analysis cannot be made on the basis of exceptions, but only on the general rule. And not even the exceptionally handsome man and beautiful woman who in the play create a perfect illusion of the one-hundred-per-cent ideal spouses who love one another for their entire lives constitute such models of married bliss in their private lives. Is it not true of these beings that they are most often also passengers on the sexual bus route on which one can transfer to one marriage after another? Is it not a very small percentage of the people who in films or on the stage have become the masses' ideal of a marriage partner are actually perfect, marriage partners in their own private lives? Do not divorces and marital tragedies abound among them? This is not said in order to belittle these great artists who can of course be great human beings with high ideals in other areas, but purely in order to show that the wave of sexual desire is everywhere, and that the beings, great artists and writers who contribute to glorifying marriage for the general public are absolutely no exception.