This time I bring you an excerpt from the anonymously written book (I eventually found out the author was none other than composer Cyril Scott) titled The Art of Making a Perfect Husband. Cause if love is just a lottery, we still have a chance! A one in a million chance, but that counts, doesn’t it?
1929: Love is a Species of Drunkenness
Romantic love is a species of drunkenness ~ even dullards are aware of this; they are aware of it when they are not in love, and either forget it or disregard it when they are.
Because of this drunkenness, it is never possible for two persons in love really to know one another; they only know what they think of one another.
Therefore all persons who marry for reasons of romantic love marry strangers; that is why marriage has been termed a lottery ~ and with justice.
It is true that marriage has nowadays ceased to be quite the lottery it formerly was, for at any rate some attempt is made on the part of young people to get really to know one another before they stand together at the altar. But even so, those who in the face of conventional morality permit themselves a certain amount of pre-conjugal intimacy, are only one degree (though an important one) nearer to safety than their more conventional brethren or forefathers. So long as engaged couples do not actually live together, in every sense of the word, in the same house, they may still, despite their intimacy, continue to remain in love, and hence fail to see each other as they really are. This observation on my part, however, should not be misconstrued: a poet may have voiced the idea that as regards matrimony the wisest and safest thing a man can do is to marry his mistress ~ but it is not exactly my mission to uphold and disseminate such a doctrine.
Source: A Husband [Cyril Scott]. The Art of Making a Perfect Husband. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers,1929.
~ pp. 13-16 ~