by Bertrand Russell
13 November 1931

A few days ago in a taxi in New York, the driver turned around (to the risk of our lives) and said: 'Excuse me, are your Bertrand Russell?'

I saw that denial would be useless, so I admitted the fact. He then went on to say that in former days he had heard me lecture, but that belonged to his intellectual past. 'Now,' he continued, 'I am a married man and have ceased to be a person.'

This seemed a painful result of matrimony and naturally set me reflecting. Why should marriage, which ought to be the fulfilment of personality, be felt as quite the opposite? There was no suggestion that his marriage was unhappy; it was to marriage as such that he attributed this dire result. I never myself experienced any such result of being married, but I know that the taxi driver was putting into words what a great many people feel.

Bertrand Russell

The reason lies partly in economics, partly in social custom. The latter, as being easier to set right, I will consider first.

The convention that husbands and wives should spend their leisure hours together is a bad one. No doubt my taxi driver's wife does not care for lectures and also does not like him to go to them without her. Many husbands and many wives will forgo their own pleasures out of jealousy of the pleasures that they imagine their partners as desiring. It is much more harmful to object to other people's pleasures than it is to be a trifle selfish in pursuing one's own, and a certain amount of social separateness of husband and wife is necessary if they are not to become dull and incapable of finding anything to say to each other. In this respect, however, a better convention is rapidly spreading.

The economic difficulty is more serious. An unmarried man can take liberties with his income that a married man cannot take. No doubt most unmarried men devote their leisure to mere amusement, including the search of a wife.

But there are a certain proportion who seek the kind of education for which there is no remuneration in dollars and cents. These men, when they marry, find that their leisure is gone and that, even if they had leisure, they have no spare cash. Women who are what, in a woman, is called intellectual feel this loss in marriage much more than men do, unless they remain childless. The result is a certain feeling against marriage on the part of both men and women.

"This trouble cannot be wholly cured unless and until the state undertakes the whole expense of children, which is not likely to happen in our time. But a good deal can be done to mitigate it by a more intelligent attitude toward the rearing of infants than that which was universal in the past and is still too frequent.

The rearing of children is a matter calling for a great deal of skill and science and giving scope for much interesting observation. No amount of skill and science can replace affection, but it can and should supplement affection, which, when it is ill-informed, may produce effects precisely contrary to those that were intended. I believe that, as people come to realize the scientific interest of infancy, intellectuals will grow less superior about family life.

The ignorant person with affection is perhaps better for an infant than a well-informed person who has no heart; but a well-informed person who is fond of children is much better than either.