Post-Prandial Philosophy by Grant Allen

Men don't marry nowadays. So everybody tells us. And I suppose we may therefore conclude, by a simple act of inference, that women in turn don't marry either. It takes two, of course, to make a quarrel -- or a marriage.

Why is this? "Young people nowadays want to begin where their fathers left off. " "Men are made so comfortable at present in their clubs. " "College-bred girls have no taste for housekeeping. " "Rents are so high and manners so luxurious. " Good heavens, what silly trash, what puerile nonsense! Are we all little boys and girls, I ask you, that we are to put one another off with such transparent humbug? Here we have to deal with a primitive instinct -- the profoundest and deepest-seated instinct of humanity, save only the instincts of food and drink and of self-preservation. Man, like all other animals, has two main functions: to feed his own organism, and to reproduce his species. Ancestral habit leads him, when mature, to choose himself a mate -- because he loves her. It drives him, it urges him, it goads him irresistibly. If this profound impulse is really lacking to-day in any large part of our race, there must be some correspondingly profound and adequate reason for it.