The genius of our civilization

All this early kid stuff is passing, a sorting-out process. We get over it. Every fellow does, or ought to be able to, if he’s worth anything, find some one woman that he can live with and stick by her. That makes the world that you and I like to live in, and you know it. There’s a psychic call in all of us to it, I think. It’s the genius of our civilization, to marry one woman and settle down.

Theodore Dreiser – Twelve Men (1919)

As posted earlier - in 1919 Theodore Dreiser published a series of short biographies of people he had known collected together in a book entitled Twelve Men. The first biography was about a young man he called Peter and this quote is Peter’s view of marriage.

It was not a throwaway remark by a clever man. He meant it, acted on it but died too early, leaving a wife and two young children.