Complex marriage definition
Complex marriage means, in their practice: that, within the limits of the community membership, any man and woman may and do freely cohabit, having first gained each other’s consent, not by private conversation or courtship, but through the intervention of some third person or persons; that they strongly discourage, as an evidence of sinful selfish- ness, what they call “exclusive and idolatrous attachment” of two persons for each other, and aim to break up by “criti- cism” and other means every thing of this kind in the com- munity; that they teach the advisability of pairing persons of different ages, the young of one sex with the aged of the other, and as the matter is under the control and management of the more aged members it is thus arranged; that “persons are not obliged, under any circumstances, to receive the attentions of those whom they do not like;” and that the propagation of children is controlled by the society, which pretends to conduct this matter on scientific principles: “Previous to about two and a half years ago we refrained from the usual rate of child- bearing, for several reasons, financial and otherwise. Since that time we have made an attempt to produce the usual num- ber of offspring to which people in the middle classes are able to afford judicious moral and spiritual care, with the advant- age of a liberal education. In this attempt twenty-four men and twenty women have been engaged, selected from among those who have most thoroughly practiced our social theory.”* Finally, they find in practice a strong tendency toward what they call “selfish love”—that is to say, the attachment