(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 you Bertrand Russell?'...
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.'
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. 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.)
