Meantime your lover does not feel
that you really love him, when you ask him to take this somewhat radical
step for your sake, or for the sake of all women, as you put it.
And there you both stand, with only this ridiculous barrier between you
and happiness.
You are still influenced by the intellectual drug, and it hinders your
heart from following out its best impulses. You have not yet learned
more than the A B C of love, or you would know that the greatest
happiness in loving lies in sacrifice. To take and not give, to gain
something and give up nothing, is not loving. Now I think I hear you
saying, "But why should not my lover give this proof of devotion as well
as I? Why should not he be ready to sacrifice a tradition, and a name,
to please me? Why am I more unloving, or selfish, than he, to refuse to
give up my name?"
My answer follows.
Any woman who asks a man to give up his name and take hers (unless some
great legal matter which involves the property rights of others hangs on
so doing) asks him to make himself ridiculous in the eyes of the world.
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