MODERN EMOTIONAL UNREST
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.
SHAKESPEARE, _Sonnet_ CXVI.
§ 11
This book is written largely in the hope that the thousands of unhappy
married women, and the unmarried too, as fate sometimes suddenly and
unexpectedly finds them a partner, will, in reading it, realize what is
making them so restless and discontented.
In the past few years all interested observers of social phenomena have
been appalled at the lightness with which a great majority of the upper
middle classes regard matrimony.
Intelligent women, readers of good books, and themselves often friends
of authors, artists, musicians, and other creative personalities are
all absorbed in the most vital topics of the day, chief of which is the
discussion of the normal adjustment of the sex relation. Indeed, it has
been charged that both women and men in this stratum of society talk
sex _ad nauseam_. This is likely to continue until the much desired
adjustment is better made than it is at present.
The cause of this concentration upon sex problems can be only the
fact that sex is a problem. If our sexual standards were fixed in a
universally serviceable pattern such that changing external conditions
did not almost hourly tend to make it antiquated and useless, the
attention of so large a proportion of civilized humanity need not be
given to it in the present-day excited manner.
It is, of course, a question whether sexual problems can ever be
permanently solved; but those in the focus of public attention today are
so insistent that it is impossible to ignore them. Various solutions are
being attempted more or less secretly where public opinion’s ban on sex
discussion is stronger; less secretly elsewhere.
But a pattern of sexual behaviour, a true love pattern, even if it
could not be final should have at least enough elasticity to make the
changes in it a gradual transition. No sensational innovations can ever
hope to be adopted overnight with the approval of society at large. In
fact, conventions in other spheres than those of love are made, and have
been made gradually for centuries. But it is a curious fact that the
conventionalities which concern the expression of the erotic impulse are
those not of yesterday but of many hundreds of years ago. This is but a
manifestation of the extreme complication of the external circumstances
of modern life in contrast with the wonderful simplicity and directness
of the emotions themselves which reverberate in response to the external
complexities.
It will appear, as this discussion proceeds, that the sexual problems
of today are conditioned by the inhibitions placed by modern economic
conditions upon the natural and instinctive expression of the erotic
impulse. In brief, both men and women talk sex and particularly women,
in a certain extensive class of society, for the real though disguised
purpose of exciting themselves sexually.
There is every satisfactory proof that this would not occur if their
sexual lives were normal. It is therefore the repressed sexual activity
that breaks out, not in sexual acts specifically, but in the vicarious
sex activity of problem novels, problem plays, risqué stories, and the
talk in mixed company which has been objected to as persistent sex talk.
Men and women with a perfectly normal love life feel no need whatever
to talk about it. But the inference from that—namely, that those who
resolutely refrain from mention of all such topics are themselves
quite normal in their own love life—is illogical in the extreme. Many
are constrained by an inner fear of self-revelation, lest they show
themselves as abnormal. Thus it may occur that some will not refuse to
discuss this most vital of all topics, for fear they may be considered
themselves abnormal.
But it is safe to say that the greater number of those who talk much
about love are those whose love is either undeveloped or in some way
awry, and that unconsciously they are attempting to straighten themselves
out, in their own eyes or in the eyes of their friends.
§ 12
The most exciting conversation on love is, of course, that between two
persons of opposite sex. And in many social circles there has of late
sprung up a new term. A married woman will have some particular male
friend not her husband, whom she laughingly refers to as her “playmate.”
With this “mate” she plays at love and love-making under the guise of
serious discussion. In some coteries, the married woman’s playmate may
be some other woman’s husband, but the favourites for playmates are
unmarried men.[6]
These “little beaux” or “playmates” are an indication of the essential
childishness of the marriage relation where they play a part, and the
position of the husband whose wife needs such amusement is an exceedingly
unenviable one, no matter how purely Platonic the relation may be between
his wife and her playmate.
§ 13
It will be consistently maintained in this book that the need of such
Platonic friendships on the part of these numerous wives is a reflection
on the lack of skill with which the husband handles the erotic situation.
He may not be, often, indeed, is not, in the least to blame for his
lack of skill, or for the discontent of his wife that causes her to
give expression to the play side of love, or, even a part of it, in
this taking of a playmate. It is a situation which practically calls
the husband a workmate, or dutymate—a situation that is fundamentally
deplorable and constitutes in fact the first step in the direction of
divorce.
The playmates provide a large amount of innocent amusement, which the
husbands do not or cannot find time possibly to furnish themselves. With
the playmates the wives go to lunches, dances, theatres, concerts, and
talk poetry, art, music—and love.
All the evidence points to the fact that these wives are not properly
mated. It is not their fault. It is their husbands’, yet, because of the
husbands’ ignorance of the love needs of women, the husbands are not to
blame, at any rate until they have taken to heart the message which this
book attempts to convey.
Possibly the wives themselves, after thinking the matter over in the
light of what they may read in this book, might talk to their husbands
about love now as perhaps once they did, and get them to realize what
they are failing to do.
Seeking intellectual stimulation from a playmate whose tenure of office
is permanent or nearly so is, as psychoanalysis has amply demonstrated,
a substitute or vicariate for sex. The women are, but of course
unconsciously, wishing for more extended and more intimate love episodes
with their playmates.
In short, restlessness of wives is an expression of the exclusively
economic trend of present-day civilization which makes a machine or an
office organization or a financial manipulation a substitute, in the mind
of the husband, for love. Such a man is most likely to take his business
home with him, where indeed business has no place—even, indeed, take it
to bed with him.
§ 14
The writer is aware of the unprecedented character of much that has
just been said, but feels that he knows whereof he speaks, also of the
revolutionary nature of the theses of the rest of this chapter in which
the subsequent matter of the book is given in outline.
First, the statement that what is popularly known as romantic love has
little if any significance in true marriage. For it will be maintained
consistently that given a not too impossible combination of man and
woman, as for example those of too widely divergent social level, any
man can woo and win any woman and make her and himself supremely happy,
entirely apart from the neurotic sentimentality of romanticism.
The theory that there is just one woman in the world who can make a given
man a perfect wife, and vice versa, is scientifically absurd, for there
is only an infinitesimal chance that these two should ever meet. Many
useless tears have been shed by men and women alike over these “ships
that pass in the night,” and thus frustrate what might have been supernal
happiness.
Concerning the marital relation, a common sense view raised to scientific
proportions, shows incontrovertibly that married happiness is a creation
of the married people themselves and chiefly of the husband. More in
every way depends on him than on the woman. As pointed out by Meisel-Hess
the “sexual crisis” of the present day is due to the failure of the
individual man to know how to play, and to play acceptably, his part in
married life.
Indeed, we may go so far as to say with absolute confidence that if a
Pacific liner should lose its way and ground on a desert island, the
thousand or so men and women passengers, supposing they were all young
and unmarried, could put their names on slips of paper in a box, and,
knowing that they were doomed to remain on the island for the rest of
their lives, draw lots for partners and become infinitely more happily
married lovers than the average married couple in civilization and quite
as happy as if they had followed conscious preference.
But the stipulation is made that the five hundred men at least must be
adepts in the erotic technique.
That is to say that the real happiness of a marriage depends solely on
the behaviour of the husband, consciously planned intelligent knowledge
of what a real marriage implies.
§ 15
It will be shown in the subsequent chapters that the aim of marriage is
not, as the reiterated phrase in Hutchinson’s novel, _This Freedom_, “men
that marry for a home” might imply, to make the husband happy. It is,
on the contrary, to make the woman happy, and the children, so that the
marriages of the future may be happier than those of the present.
It will be shown that the husband not only can, if he knows how, but
must, if he wishes to be happy himself, first see to it that discontent
is an unknown thing. It is in his hands solely. His wife has practically
nothing to do with it. The dependence of the woman on the man for erotic
life is as absolute as that of the newborn infant on the mother for
nutrition.
The concept of romantic love, like that of love at first sight, contains
the implication that love and especially married love depends more upon
what Fate or Destiny vouchsafes to the man than upon what he takes from
Fate or creates for himself. The taking and creating is certainly the
prerogative of the man while yet it may not necessarily belong to the
woman.
§ 16
That is the essential difference between the masculine and the feminine
nature. It is masculine to give and to create and to change external
reality. It is feminine to receive, and to respond to the activity of the
male. It is feminine to be thrilled at the effects produced upon the wife
by her husband’s activities in every sphere of action. It is masculine
to be thrilled only by the resultant ecstasies of the wife. It is not
masculine to be emotionally impressed except by the results of his own
individual and particular actions: results effected in other persons and
things.
This is the essential masculinity and femininity assumed in this book.
It will be evident to those acquainted with modern psychology that the
reverse of these conditions implies the interchange of masculine and
feminine psychic natures.
For example the man who should (and yet not a few do) derive his
satisfactions solely from the emotions aroused in him by the actions of
other persons and things is not truly masculine. His love could not in
any real sense be called virile.
§ 17
Virile love is the only love that a man should have—the only feeling a
real man _can_ have—for a woman. Indeed, it is the only way a man loves
a woman if he is truly to be said to _love_ her. Any so-called love
depending on being charmed by a woman is essentially effeminate, not
virile. The moment he surrenders to her _charm_, he is not a man but an
autoerotic[7] child. _He_ should absolutely and positively charm _her_.
There is no disgrace, no lack of true femininity in a woman’s yielding
to the power a man must exercise over her erotic instincts. The power is
strictly a one-way power, exerted by the man upon the woman if, and only
as long as, he remains man and she remains woman. The bisexual nature of
both man and woman often permits a couple to reverse this direction of
power influence.[8]
If the wife’s charm is the only binding factor in a marriage the marriage
is doomed to dissolve actually or potentially. And in order to maintain
this merely superficial charm, which no real man needs to feel in a
woman, she is obliged to resort to all varieties of artifice from the
lip stick and the exotic perfume upward to the forced attempt to be
intellectually frank and interesting. Woman as woman has no need for this
artifice to maintain charm for primordial man.
It may be that man at the present day is not primordial superficially.
But fundamentally he is and so is woman primordial woman, and for all the
civilization which is only conscious, the ninety per cent more or less
of unconscious action and being in the man acts upon and is inevitably
and automatically reacted to by the woman; and any survey of the totality
of the relations between them is incomplete if it does not recognize
and control the almost unlimited energy of the primordial man and woman
beneath the surface. The difficulty is that this recognition is a task;
and most married couples attempt to hide it both from themselves and
from each other. In such actions of the woman as are dominated, as most
conscious acts are, by the egoistic-social[9] impulse, any artifice,
great or small, as the case may be, is inevitably registered, to the
woman’s detriment, in the unconscious records of the man.
“Does she,” the unconscious says, “really _need_ these embellishments,
or does she only _think_ she needs them? If she really needs them, I
have reels of mental moving pictures of women who do not. If she only
thinks so, what have I failed to do that should inspire her confidence,
or prevent her from unconsciously trying to attract the autoerotic
glances of other men? I must adjust her up to a greater height of erotic
exaltation. Possibly that is the fundamental reason. If she were actually
my erotic counterpart the idea would not even unconsciously enter her
mind to improve herself in this showy manner. I must remove this tendency
from her.”
Of course the husband likes to have his wife appear attractive to him;
but that does not require any branch of the cosmetic art except what
she can do without drugs, pastes, powders and other mechanical aids. Of
course he wants her to interest him mentally but that does not require
her to do or say anything spectacular or anything that has any “news
value.”
In her own femininity (which by the way is never enhanced but only
lessened by strenuous efforts to appear charming either to himself or
others), he has the field which he can, and will, in proportion to his
psychic virility, cultivate into his own particular Garden of Eden. In
her own essential womanliness he has the ground where he can plant and
build, without external aid, the garden and the mansion, the work of his
own hands, according to his own design, the outward expression of all
that is fine and masculine in his own imagination. Any failure in the
execution of this plan is due to the shaking of his own hand, the lack of
attention on his own part to the necessary details.
§ 18
Arnold Bennett (in _Pictorial Review_, November 1922), writes: “She
absolutely must exercise charm, whether things are going right or going
wrong.... Women were born to exercise charm.... A large proportion of
women, especially pretty ones, suffer from the illusion that in order to
exercise charm they need only continue to exist. A mistake! To exercise
charm is an active and not a passive function. It cannot be efficiently
done without thought and hard work. It is sometimes very trying and
exhausting, like earning money—but it is not less essential than earning
money if life is to be fully lived.”
Many women prefer to earn money rather than follow this unremunerative
trade of exercising charm; because they realize that earning money is
productive and exercising charm is not. They can get in dollars a measure
of their efforts. In personal charm, however, there is no measurable
factor, except in reaction on the male, and that is an autoerotic element
in his mental make-up.
Feminine charm is to be sure active and not passive. It is, however,
reactive and not spontaneously active. It reacts to the positive action
of the man, which is the response characteristic of true femininity
anywhere, any time. As to its necessitating thought and hard work and
being trying and exhausting, the contrary is the truth. No man can
but dislike a woman who has thought and worked hard, been tried and
become _exhausted_ by this thoroughly artificial and unnatural attempt
to “exercise charm.” His unconscious and real reaction to this trying
position into which the woman puts herself to retain his affection by
exercising charm is one of revolt. He may not know it but it is there all
the time, and comes out in the unhappy moments.
And this attempt recommended by Mr. Bennett is only a superficial
attempt. It never really succeeds permanently. It is the reason why men
avoid designing women. They say to themselves unconsciously that this
forced effort is an overcompensation for a real (i.e., unconsciously
perceived) inferiority.
The only thing rightly to be called charm is the pleasantness of the
natural reaction on the woman’s part to the binary situation, the
situation of man and woman in social intercourse. Her forcing herself is
always repugnant to him, if he is normally himself. The word charm,[10]
therefore, applies to a type or action on her part that is conditioned
solely on her being with him. It is character and conduct, ingenuous,
instinctive, spontaneous; revealing, without traditional or conventional
inhibitions, the essence of true womanliness, and brought out only in the
situation that is really, and in the highest sense, erotic, where the
erotic holds sway over the more ignoble egoistic-social impulse.
Her charm for her husband will consist in the fact that she is woman
and wife first and foremost. That is enough for a man who is first and
foremost man and husband. Uninhibited woman, unwarped by sex inhibitions,
spontaneously making her direct response, her natural reaction
uninterrupted, unperverted, unbroken by archaic traditions that have
overweighted the egoistic social instincts and debased the erotic—such a
woman has and will always have the maximum of charm for unperverted man.
The eternal femininity, the universal femininity, is always at the core
of every woman’s being.
Virile love alone is competent to tear away the impediments that perturb
its reactions, and when this is done true monogamy is inevitable, for
there is no preventive mechanism obstructing the total fusion of their
bodies and souls. That kind of charm any woman naturally exerts over any
man, but it has nothing in common with the conventional charm of the
cosmetic and costumer’s art.
The monogamic husband, if he reads beneath the surface, feels this
charm in all other women as well as in his wife; but, as he knows what
it amounts to in care and attention, to uncover the soul of his wife,
he realizes that to undertake the task with another woman would not be
worth the candle. He _could do it_, but he knows he would get no more
satisfaction from another woman than from his wife.
§ 19
In the sense of the universal and eternal feminine charm being exerted
upon the primordial masculine, love is always love at first sight. But
the reason that love at first sight becomes hate at second or closer
sight is just this inability of the man to play the truly virile part.
What has charmed him at first sight no longer charms him simply because
all charm exerted upon him produces in him the autoerotic mental
reaction. Only the first sight should produce that result. If the second
look is not accompanied by the desire to dominate and to explore the
depths of the soul behind that face, it is the look not of a virile man
but of an autoerotic boy. And the boy goes on being charmed by the face;
or stops being charmed and is antagonized. She will antagonize him
actively and positively, of course, if, in due season, she does not sense
in him the virile action. With her hostility aroused by this unconscious
sense of his weakness felt by her, he is disgusted naturally and looks
for another face.
The modern hologamous marriage is the creative work of a virile man, a
work that, as do all vital things, needs constantly to be kept up. No
overgrown boy will be able to accomplish this virile work, for being
mostly brought up by women, he will not know what _is_ the real work of
virile man in marriage.
The marriages that run down, those in which the egoistic-social or
material impulses gain the ascendancy over the erotic or spiritual
impulses, are the marriages of autoerotic boys, not of virile men.
Psychic virility of the husband in the marital relation is the only
factor that can insure the permanence, except superficially, of any
marriage. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”
There should be alteration in love, but it should be caused by the
progressive development of the husband’s love. This is the theory of
relativity applied in the erotic sphere. Love should not alter when—that
is, because—it finds alteration; but it should make changes in the
reactions of the wife, so that each year finds the married lovers more
completely fused physically and spiritually than the year before.
From the woman’s point of view, she is invited by marriage to a banquet,
at which she may reasonably expect to find a variety of comestibles all
of adult characteristics. If at this banquet she is served by her husband
only with milk or pap she is rightly revolted, and will not eat. Milk
alternating with pap in successive courses of marital banquet would be
cruelty and adequate cause for separation, if their exclusive presence
could be attributed to the voluntarily malevolent choice of the husband.
But in most cases it is merely his ignorance for which his parents and
teachers are the blameless cause.
§ 20
Is there any clearer truth than that all autoerotic practices in
the marital union are unmanly? And is there any statement more
incontrovertible than that the average husband who has not taken
the trouble to know and control his wife in the erotic sphere is
unequivocally autoerotic mentally?
Can it be doubted that the average woman has no possible means of knowing
whether her suitor will, after marriage, be an autoerotic boy or virile
man? Can we blame her if she is forced by our crazy laws to make this
a trial marriage, divorce him if she can, and make another trial? Can
we blame anyone for taking food if she is starving and call her act
stealing? Not unless we have made it perfectly plain to her how and
where she may legitimately obtain food. But we can blame the man, for
he is, he always has been, and he always will be the provider of erotic
power. A man has no right to undertake the erotic support of any woman,
and then proceed to starve her and incontinently to fatten himself upon
her. Universally such a man is scorned and always will be, except by
women whose erotic instincts have been overgrown and overwhelmed by the
egoistic-social impulses of conventionality. These do not scorn a man
who resorts to prostitutes to feed his autoerotic appetites, or who keeps
mistresses or has other illicit liaisons for the same purposes.
The moment an anthropoid human realizes what he is _getting_ from the
promiscuous relations, and that he is autoerotically getting in a
_puerile_ way instead of giving in a _virile_ way, he takes no more
interest whatever in the promiscuous relation. The reply to an obvious
objection here is that if he finds his wife lacking in passion it means
he has not learned to know his wife, and, if he thinks he finds more
passion in the extra-marital woman, he is either deceiving himself or
being deceived by her, the extra-marital one; and that he is _sexually as
anesthetic to all women_ as he fancies his wife to be anesthetic to him.
Unless she is a chronic invalid he has no justification in thinking
that passion is impossible between them. He has not the knowledge of
himself wherewith to develop in himself enough virility to awaken her
erotic instincts. When once awakened these will adequately satisfy him.
If he has not aroused them in his wife there is little chance that he
will arouse a real feeling in other women. If he cannot consistently be
satisfied with one woman and believes that men are incurably polygamous,
let him, first, be sure to sound his wife’s erotism to the bottom, and
he will then need no other woman nor fatuously imagine he wants another.
This is the surest cure for the polygamous-nature-of-man delusion.
The errant husband may think he roves in search of a real woman. As
husband he has a real woman by his side; but, having a real woman as
near to him as he can bring himself to approach, he wanders forth in
search of an imaginary woman, who does not exist in reality. There is no
such thing as the imaginary woman except in his mind. His virile function
is to make over this real woman at his side according to the mental
pattern he has of woman as she should be, and within reasonable limits
he can do it, if he has the virile strength to control his own emotions
in her presence. If he cannot do it in hers he cannot do it in another
woman’s, just because he has failed to do so in his wife’s.
The answer will of course be made that a man may marry a shrew. To this
the reply is that a shrew like Katharine in Shakespeare’s play is a
woman who has not been taught to love as every wife should be. A shrew
is simply a woman not yet erotically developed. It may, to be sure,
take a more than ordinarily ardent lover to develop such a woman, but
barring the exceedingly rare cases of women in whom love is a physical
impossibility, the shrewishness of a woman is only a measure of the
inadequacy of the husband. Except for the sporadic freaks of nature there
is no such thing as an impossible woman.
§ 21
_Mutuality_
In the minds of young lovers no doubt exists that their love should be
mutual. The doubt comes later in their married life that possibly some
impediment either existed in a latent state before they were married
and has developed since, so that they ceased to be mutual; or, not
previously existing, was developed by some factor in their later married
life unforeseen in their earlier days and therefore impossible to avoid.
In the creation and maintenance of mutuality in the early married life
the young husband is the only one concerned. If there is real mutuality
caused by a perfect response in his bride, he can maintain it only if
he knows how he has gained it. If it was gained by merely instinctive
actions on his own part, and if he is impressed by the beauty of the
mystery, and repeats to himself how wonderful it is, and how inexplicable
to have so warm a response, he will not have a good chance of continuing
it. He will have to do what he has not yet done. Consciously, and
purposefully, he will observe his wife’s reactions during the entirety of
the love episode; that is, from the beginning of one quite through to the
beginning of the next one, not merely the period of the highest level of
erotic excitement.
It is the privilege of woman to remain autoerotic in her reactions. She
may or may not rise to allerotic action during her entire life. But man
can never succeed in the marital life if he remains autoerotic. His first
reactions to the marital situation are necessarily autoerotic. He cannot
avoid that. His previous experience with women, if any, and particularly
with prostitutes, gives him at first little if any opportunity to be
with his wife other than essentially autoerotic in his reactions. A
man’s first experience of a woman in an attempt at a love episode is
invariably a bath of absolutely new sensations, a plunge into a sea of
diverse stimuli, a medium in which many men flounder for the remainder
of their lives, gaining each time no more than an uncoördinated congeries
of external excitement in which they act in no controlling manner. Such
men never mate a woman in the highest sense. They only supply her with a
child in the guise of a husband. There is no mutuality between the surf
and the bather who is helplessly tossed about in the breakers and is
finally washed up on the shore and left breathless by his contact with
the countless laughter of the sea.
Mutuality in the love episode depends solely on the husband’s ability to
control the situation. There is no real mutuality in a relation where
the wife is merely a dispenser of physical delights to a husband that
neither knows nor cares what he himself contributes to the situation, who
immerses himself totally in his own sensations. He is deaf, blind and
otherwise anesthetic to what he himself can accomplish in the line of
studied and foreplanned effects of his own, self-initiated (not merely
instinctive and automatic reflex) actions upon his wife. True, there
are many women who expect no more of a man than just this automatic
autoerotism. But, sooner or later, even though unconsciously, they
perceive a lack of “some amorous rite or other” and their own passion
cools, if it has had any warmth. There is no mutuality here.
§ 22
Mutuality does not exist where the wife has no alternative other than
the autoerotic reaction of the husband. But in spite of an unchanging
autoerotic disposition of the wife, mutuality may be absolutely secured
by the instructed husband. As indicated below, the average honeymoon
should see the beginning of the end of mental autoerotic reactions on the
part of the groom.
Even the groom that has had previous sex experience is in his early
marriage in an erotic situation which is essentially new to him—a
situation that contains elements the like of which he never could have
experienced before. The inevitable novelty of these new elements is a
condition, on his part, of perceiving all new sensations, practically of
having unprecedented things done to him.
The things done to him are more numerous and newer than anything in
all his previous experience. In this sense, then, he is by force of
circumstances placed upon an autoerotic level, from which it is his
imperative duty to ascend in order that by his control of his own erotic
reactions he may control those of his wife. No apology is needed for an
initial autoerotic response on the newly wedded husband’s part.
It might be said that in the situation of bride and groom each having
things done to them by the other, rather than positively doing things to
each other, there might be a situation of perfect mutuality. But if it
is, it never remains any longer than the duration of a honeymoon, for
the essential femininity of the woman demands that in the erotic sphere
alone, she be led, and with no uncertain guidance.
The honeymoon ends automatically when this point is reached; and the
condition of true mutuality in perfect marital relations ensues if the
husband has a virile love of his wife and takes the lead. If his love
is not virile, but merely autoerotic and puerile, he never assumes
this leadership, and his wife becomes more and more unresponsive to
him, simply because the only type of activity to which she can respond
is an erotic virility, a true manliness that contains the real essence
of masculinity which is the imperative necessity to control the entire
erotic life of one woman.
§ 23
It should not be assumed that these remarks about the honeymoon imply
that all honeymoons or even any of them are failures. The failures,
if such appear, are only apparent, and need not necessarily be real;
for their success is always within reach of the husband who needs only
knowledge and confidence. His one aim is the proper response of his
wife, and that is his only needful success. If he uses intelligence and
acquires knowledge (and the honeymoon is the source of his knowledge of
the extent of his wife’s inhibitions, negativisms and resistances) his
progress is limited only by the small amount of his love. If he has love
enough, which includes a determination to win, he will succeed. And it
should be remembered that a woman’s consent to marry is not her admission
that she has been won, but only her consent to let the man win her
thereafter, if he can.
When this control is properly assumed by the mentally and spiritually
virile husband, real mutuality begins in the marital life. The husband
now conquers his unavoidable initial autoerotic habit of mind and
thought, and at the same time becomes a truly social being, realizing
that by his own self-control alone, in the love episode, which
absolutely assures his wife’s complete erotic affiliation with him, he
is securing the only kind of mutuality worthy of the name.
It is obvious that _this_ mutuality is reciprocal in a sense entirely
different from any mutuality that could be attributed to the relation
during the honeymoon stage. He knows now what erotically emotional
effects he can produce on his wife during the love episodes, and exactly
how he has produced them. Beyond any doubt whatsoever, he also knows from
the most intimate experience that the production of these effects is the
only real mutuality.
An effect, in the erotic sphere, produced in a husband by a wife, is
one from which all truly virile men realize they gain only autoerotic
pleasure. To this effect they contribute themselves nothing. In the end
the wife gets nothing of the emotional catharsis which is the _sine qua
non_ of true marital living. In such circumstances the wife gives and
the husband receives, certainly a gross disgrace if it be continued, a
disgrace abhorred by all men. There is no mutuality in such a gift which
but impoverishes the recipient.
It thus appears that in the marital relation the husband alone is the one
rightly to be the giver. And his gift impoverishes neither himself nor
his wife, the recipient, but paradoxically enriches both. The husband
rightly gives his time, his attention, his love and thereby controls. But
in order to do this he has to control himself absolutely, so as not to
snatch away from both of them that of which nature has designed him to be
the donor.
Mutuality requires the husband to be sure to get something, but the
thing he can get is the erotic acme of his wife, and this is the only
result that, to the spiritually and mentally virile husband, has any
value whatever. If, on the other hand, he takes his own erotic relaxation
without getting hers it is merely a half gift which he forces, or
persuades, her to give him, and mutuality is out of the question.
§ 24
The idea of compensation or barter or _quid pro quo_ must be rigidly
excluded from the concept of mutuality; for this measuring of the balance
of values of the actual physical performances or even intellectual
attainments rests for its validity on the inevitable comparisons which
are the basis of all values for the egoistic-social activities. To the
greatest erotic success these comparisons are utterly antagonistic. In
the erotic sphere, as is later noted,[11] comparisons are not merely
odious, but logically impossible. There can be no balancing of giving and
taking.
From one point of view, the husband cannot but give all and receive
nothing, at least of the character of that which he gives. He gives an
emotional reaction to a woman, which no other man can give.
He cannot in return reproduce in himself the emotional reaction of a
woman. He cannot react as a woman reacts, if he be a virile lover, for
such a reaction, though common enough in run-down marriages, is not the
emotional reaction of a man. If his bisexuality leads him to approximate
this feminine reaction, he is to that extent himself feminine and not
masculine.
One should not, however, ignore the fact that both men and women are
normally bisexual to a slight extent, and to that degree woman will
desire to exercise some control in the erotic sphere, even if it be only
to create in her mate the most complete erotic effects. Also, if a woman
with a comparatively large proportion of masculinity in her nature be
married to a man with an equal proportion of femininity, a happy marriage
may result, if no other adverse elements enter.
But in general it will be admitted that the husband cannot rightly seek
for himself the type of erotic reaction which is proper and peculiar to
his wife; though it must be confessed that the suggestions operative even
in the average married love episode are strongly that way. The husband
hears the ecstatic responses of his wife and her repeated inquiries as
to his own pleasurable sensations, and the whole situation is such as to
suggest to him that he identify in every respect his own feelings with
hers.
But to do so is in no degree to make for true mutuality. His own feelings
should not be the utter surrender and abandon to physical and mental
bliss which he sees so profoundly moving to his partner. His feeling
should be a pervading sense of triumph and accomplishment, no less
profound for being embedded in sensual gratification. The truth is that
biologically the wife has no positive accomplishment to perform in the
love episode; for the only accomplishment of which she is capable is the
utter dissolution, temporary though it be, of the personality of her
husband. If she succeeds, she is in the position of one who, not knowing,
should try, by applying a match, to see whether or not gunpowder is
inflammable. It is, and she is carefully kept in ignorance of the fact,
but plentifully supplied with matches.
If this quite easy accomplishment of the wife is successfully performed,
she has no husband left, at least for a while, and the explosion has
ruined her own chance of happiness, until more explosive is provided.
The husband’s unequivocal task, therefore, which alone assures his
erotically supporting his wife is rigidly to remain uninflammable until
she, metaphorically speaking, is in ashes herself. For this scientific
reduction of the modern wife, the modern husband needs, for he rarely
finds it instinctively, the help of the present-day technique of love as
taught by the best erotologists.[12]
This will enable him to avoid being consumed to a condition where he is
no longer able to produce any effect at the very time when an effect is
most loudly clamored for by nature.
The quick ignition of explosive powder produces only a puff and a flash,
but the wife desires no flashlight of that type but a guiding star.
True mutuality, therefore, cannot be present in a couple where the
husband does not reverse this process and absolutely retain his own
emotional tension until her erotic acme has taken place. It cannot be
too often repeated that the only means of securing the wife’s emotional
catharsis in the acme of the love episode is the husband’s remaining
tense and unrelaxed, avoiding his own emotional catharsis until hers is,
beyond the peradventure of a doubt, secured.
§ 25
An absolutely novel and unprecedented result follows the successful
accomplishment of this erotically virile performance.[13] The husband
gains a relaxation of all his tensions; the most important of all, and
the greatest, being that relaxation of his caused by the total relaxation
of his wife’s erotic tension. A good part of his own tension is caused by
his knowledge of hers.
The even unconscious knowledge that this has not been accomplished is the
little rift within the lute of married life that increases until their
relations eventually become no longer sweet bells, but jangled out of
tune and harsh. No matter how much intellectual congeniality there may
be between the married partners, which is a factor more egoistic-social
than erotic, this lack of unconscious rapport is actually sensed, though
not directly. With characteristically human proclivity to rationalize
(instead of to know facts and to reason from them), husband and wife
begin to disagree upon points apparently most remote from anything
erotic, as for example the position of pieces of furniture in the house,
or the thousand and one details of solely egoistic-social import.
This does not mean at all that they are not going to have differences
of opinion. On the contrary, honest differences of opinion and taste
are to be acknowledged by each as proof of the other’s positiveness of
character; and the surprises caused in the husband by the unexpected
reactions of his wife to all sorts of situations, chiefly egoistic-social
ones, are part of the variety which is the spice of marital living.
They congratulate themselves that their disagreements and disputes do
not concern really fundamental things, though if they but knew it, there
would be now, as there once was (but they have forgotten), no question
raised about such matters simply because such matters do not belong to
the sphere of marital erotism.
Complete erotic mutuality based on the proper “firing order” of the love
emotions of husband and wife, distinctly separates and keeps separate and
apart from the single erotic sphere, where the twain are one flesh, their
two individual spheres of their separate egoistic-social impulses and
activities. The husband leaves unquestioned all of these activities of
his wife and vice versa.
There thus emerges with increasing clearness the prime importance of the
distinction between erotic and egoistic-social impulses and activities,
and with this distinction grows the unalterable conviction, from every
aspect of human values, of the unquestionable superiority of the erotic
sphere over the egoistic-social spheres.
It is a matter of scientific proof of the last few years, too, that
in the married relation this ascendancy of the erotic over the
egoistic-social sphere is not only conducive to the greatest health,
happiness and longevity but also productive of the greatest material
success. The most successful men and women, from every point of view from
the material to the spiritual, are the men who have secured, and the
women who have experienced, this truly human erotic mutuality.
§ 26
It is the object of the present volume to point out that the
non-existence of the erotic acme in the wife is an inexcusable condition,
that can be remedied, and that its substitution by the ability of the
husband to insure the acme in the wife as often as she desires it is a
condition of the true physical and spiritual progress which should mark
the present century.
Nothing could seem further from the truly American ideal of a good
“sport” than that there should be men who will take all and give nothing.
No excuse is accepted of men who enter a game, and, as soon as they
are in, become paralyzed and unable to do a single thing except shout
about their membership on the team. But that is exactly what the average
husband does in his marriage. He marries mostly to get something for
nothing in sex life and he finds out later that the something turns out
to be nothing. Who is to blame but himself?
He makes innumerable excuses for his failure, excuses sometimes handed
out to him by physicians. He is a man and men are known to be hasty in
the love episode. Civilized men always are and have been. There is no
help for it. Their wives must make themselves content with the crumbs
that fall from the husband’s table. It is injurious for men to change
in any way or degree their instinctive reactions. Postponement or doing
without their own erotic acme acts in such a way as to constitute a
strain on the man’s nervous system. All these false statements have been
made by different people at different times.
The necessary control on the man’s part is possible to attain, and
once attained it is easy to maintain. But it depends upon a fundamental
rearrangement of all values for the man such that the greatest value for
him is not in the pleasurable sensations that he himself gets out of his
relations with his wife but in the gratifications, totally different in
sense quality, that come from the sense of triumph over resistances that
is experienced by him when he has for the first time attained, or finally
has secured, such control over himself that he can thereby control the
emotional specifically erotic reactions of his wife.
If a man’s deepest unconscious satisfactions came from being emotionally
controlled by a woman he would never learn to control hers. The
unconscious satisfactions invariably are felt when control over the
woman’s erotic responses is held by the man.
Nevertheless there is a level of unconscious reaction causing feelings of
gratification that even in men come from being controlled. More will be
said about this later. Instinctively in many boys this control is thrown
off. They rebel against paternal authority. They scorn being managed by
girls. They prefer to be themselves and act their own acts and derive
satisfaction from the effects of those acts upon the persons or things of
the external world.
Yet the fact that all individuals of both sexes, when infants and
children, are dependent, and can gain satisfaction and relaxations of
tensions of desire never by means of their own acts but only by means
of the acts of others, makes it quite evident that there will be a
tendency, stronger in some than in others, to get in post-pubertal life
their satisfactions via the old route—the satisfactions that come from
having things done to them and not from doing things for other people
and observing the results.
There are two sources of satisfaction in every human, the infantile one
which may be called passive and the adult male which may be called the
active source or the source of satisfaction from the effects of one’s own
action.
§ 27
It is not to be overlooked that the satisfaction derived from the effect
of one’s own action may be due to an unconscious magnifying of these
effects. Those who have a slight degree of discriminative ability will
think that their acts and the results of their acts are fine, whether
they are or not, and may remain in the same illusion throughout their
lives. They may never become disillusioned. I may continue to believe
that the effects produced on my readers are deep and far-reaching
whether they are or not. But if I were content to read books and listen
to lectures and felt no desire to write and to influence others or
to persuade them to see things as I see them I should derive all my
satisfactions via the route of passive experiences.
There is a fundamental difference, then, between the essentially
masculine and the essentially feminine type of character, according as
the individual gets his satisfactions—the relaxations of his tensions of
desire—via the route of feelings caused in him by the action of others
or via the route of feelings caused in him by the true and illusionless
perception that he has produced effects in other persons or in other
things.
The rearrangement of values is the transition from a frame of mind in
which the satisfactions are via the “passive” route to those via the
active route. This rearrangement need never, for any biological reason,
take place in a woman who is properly mated. If she be married but
not mated by a male individual who has not made the above-mentioned
transition, she will herself tend toward getting her satisfaction via the
“active” or “male” route. In other words, rather than have nothing, she
deludes herself into thinking she has something by getting a cheapened
substitute, by becoming husband to her husband, who in turn becomes wife.
No man can be said to be successful as a husband who has not made this
transition. No man is exempt from the necessity of the transition from
this type of physical autoerotism to allerotism, simply because he was
once an infant, and until he makes this transition he is, no matter what
his age in years, still an infant. It has been undeniably proved by
psychoanalysis and experienced by people in innumerable forms that no
woman can be dominated by an infantile man.
Therefore every man is either the one or the other; either an adult man
or an infantile man. He can by taking thought, and after reading books
like the present, learn to which class he belongs. If he belongs in the
infantile class he has been dominated by the “mother imago” or “angel
imago,”[14] and if this be a fixation it will require a deep analysis by
an expert before he can come to a realization of his true status; but
it is unlikely that nine out of ten who read this book will require
more than the advice offered in the following chapters. Or it will
require a good orientation and suggestive treatment from a well equipped
erotologist.
No wife can be a thoroughly happy one whose husband is in the infantile
class, and who thus needs her “playmate.” (See § 12.) Such women are
truly in a tragic situation. The infantile (autoerotic) behaviour of
such a man in the fragmentary (never complete) love episodes leaves the
woman nervous, “on edge,” with an unconscious conflict in her psyche that
tends to undermine her health, and to make her an insuperable mystery to
her husband, who himself suffers through his own ignorance. He knows,
if he knows anything, only that something is amiss, but blinded by his
own egotism can never believe that the cause lies solely in him, no
matter how blameless he may be, from one point of view, on account of his
ignorance.
§ 28
To return then to the proposition with which we started: If the man
believes that the woman can by her action evoke his erotic acme, she
can. He should know and believe that she cannot; unless he knows she is
going to arrive at her erotic acme at the same time he does. But no man
can ever be absolutely sure of that, particularly if his egoistic-social
impulses are inordinately active and she has few if any such activities,
comparatively, and more leisure to follow erotic impulses.
The autoerotic condition in a man is the cause of his haste in the love
episode, as his attention is so primarily centered on his own sensations
that he excludes the possibility of his observation of his wife’s
reactions in the most intimate of marital relations. If the husband is
hasty, he is _ipso facto_ mentally autoerotic. His haste is caused by
his mental autoerotism. In blunt language he loves himself more than his
wife. He may love the results she produces in his feelings. What he needs
is to learn how to love more, to be more passionate, to go deeper into
the nature of erotism, into the study of the woman, his wife, and her
individuality, particularly her unconscious reactions to him.
The thought, “I can control the most elusive thing in the universe—a
woman’s erotism,” is the most triumphant thought that can occur to a man,
except possibly the thought, “And I know how to continue to control it.”
It is almost equivalent and is analogous in many respects to an ability
to overcome gravitation and propel oneself at will through the air at any
desired speed.
§ 29
In this connection it must be emphasized that control of the erotic
situation by the husband is absolutely and unequivocally mental.
In order also to give due weight to the reply to an objection that might
be made here, two new terms will be proposed. The objection is that
the distinction between mental and physical is purely arbitrary, so it
is futile to say that the control is exclusively mental, because the
exclusively mental does not exist. Mind, apart from body, is non-existent.
The answer: All phenomena into which a so-called mental element enters
can be graded into what would be called without objection on the part
of anyone, more mental or less mental, meaning, of course, consciously
mental. Thus digestion is less mental than phantasying or day-dreaming,
and some emotions might be called less mental than others.
But because we are required by everything that we know about the
mind-body combination, to suppose that no so-called purely mental state
is without its physical substratum without which it would not exist,
and because no physiological process is totally outside of all causal
connection with the mind, we are justified in saying that mind is more
highly organized body, and body less highly organized mind.
Regarding then any human phenomenon as conditioned by both mental and
physical causes we can remove the difficulty, and at the same time the
objection that is being answered here, by adopting three Greek words and
coining two new English words from them.
_Soma_ is the Greek for _body_; _hyper_ for _upper_, or _above_; and
_hypo_ for _under_ or _below_. So we may call the ordinary physiological
movements and processes _hyposomatic_ or a lower form of action of the
mind-body combination. Similarly we may use the name _hypersomatic_ for
the various degrees of mentality. From the point of view of this book
all human action is somatic. Some of it such as digestion, glandular
secretion, is hyposomatic or at one end of a series of degrees of
complexity. Some human action is hypersomatic, such as remembering. Some
of the human phenomena, like emotions, partake of both ends of the series
in apparently more or less equal proportions.
§ 30
To return, then, after this digression, to the statement that control
is entirely mental: By this, of course, is meant control according to a
hypersomatic pattern. There is no control without a pattern. One never is
said to control one’s actions unless he has an idea according to which he
is going to act. Otherwise his actions are automatic—not controlled.
The immediate connection of this with our present argument is this then
(an argument that runs right along with the ideas of autosuggestion): any
man can do what any man has done, if he has the same hypersomatic pattern
according to which his actions are carried out.
An obvious objection will at once be made, but it is only an apparent
one. Many men will say they know they are physically weak, or
weak-willed, are lacking in control. They know it because they have
_never_ controlled their love emotions, and have _little_ control over
any of their emotions.
To that excuse, the answer is: just because you have not is no proof that
you cannot. If that were the case no progress would ever have been made
by humanity.
That you have not controlled yourself is proof only that you have not
yet vividly imagined a pattern according to which your actions might be
carried out. The only hypersomatic pattern existing in your personality
is that according to which you are now acting.
Countless biographies of men, great and less great, demonstrate that
there have been revolutionary, cataclysmic changes in their actions
resulting from alterations in the patterns, i.e., changes in the
hypersomatic end of their personality.
The man who says he cannot change his actions is simply saying he cannot
change his ideas. That would be somewhat analogous to saying he cannot
learn a foreign language. But we know that everyone going to a foreign
country and being environed month after month by a foreign language
_will_ learn to speak it, whether he tries or not. How easily and quickly
he does is a matter only of his hypersomatic elasticity. Some are more
elastic than others, but almost anyone who can walk can learn to change
his hypersomatic patterns, can in other words become conscious of a new
hypersomatic pattern, see its superiority to an old one, and regulate and
control his actions accordingly.
§ 31
Psychoanalysis has among other striking paradoxes this one most
applicable here. The person who says he cannot do a thing is consciously
saying, “I cannot,” but unconsciously saying, “I do not wish to.”
Any reply that can be made by any man who says he cannot learn to control
his own erotic emotions and therefore is unable to control his wife’s is
excusing himself, on the ground that he will not be censured by others
if he is really unable. He may be laughed at, or commiserated for his
incapacities, but he cannot, so he thinks, be held responsible for them.
But if there is one important and valuable advance made by modern
psychology it is that the unconscious, which says, “I do not wish
to,” causing the conscious man to say, “I cannot”—this unconscious
can be trained, reëducated, reshaped, repatterned. It may take more
than a month. The final emergence of action, based on the re-patterned
unconscious, may be sudden. But it can be done.
Those who say, “I cannot do it” are in their ignorance simply saying, “I
do not wish to do it.”
They would wish to do it if they had in their minds—in the hypersomatic
portion of their personalities—an adequately vivid picture of exactly
what it is desired to do.
It would be impossible to put into a book a detailed pattern of marital
behaviour on the part of husbands, particularly hyposomatic details.
But it is hoped that the book will give as clear an exposition of the
hypersomatic lineaments of the marital pattern as will be required to
make any man that reads it at least willing to change his own love
pattern for one that has in it infinitely more satisfaction and triumph,
containing as it does the only means whereby a single demi-human atom may
completely unite with another and form an entirely new whole.
§ 32
As far as records are available there is no reason to suppose that the
champion shot-putter, prize-fighter, or longshoreman is any more _able_
to evoke in his wife the climax of erotic ecstasy than is the rather
flat-chested, spectacled college professor, the department store head,
the banker, or any other member of the so-called sedentary professions.
The latter class of people have unduly and illogically overvalued the
hyposomatic end of the scale. Woman can be courted and married (and
thereafter won!) by men whose strength is hypersomatic just as well as
by those whose strength is hyposomatic. But so far as the physical or
hyposomatic side of the marital relation is concerned, there may be a
difference between the pugilist and the college professor in the amount
of egoistic-social development in comparison with the amount of erotic
development in his past history.
After reading this chapter many people may feel disappointed and say:
“You have not told me how I can insure my erotic self-control (or my
husband’s).”
I will anticipate somewhat by saying that the affirmation “I know I can
control,” if repeated enough times a day with sufficient conviction would
undoubtedly help. If to this were added, “I know I love my wife better
than I do myself,” it would also be a step in the right direction.
But for the material of the pattern on which is based the conviction of
the truth of man’s ability to control himself, I shall have to refer the
reader to the later chapters in the book.
At first all I can hope to do is to convince some of the men who read
this book that they belong to the infant class of husbands. If the men
whose wives are discontented or whose sweethearts are slow in promising,
can read and realize that the whole situation is psychic or mental
(hypersomatic) rather than physical or economic (hyposomatic), they
will see that from one point of view their victory over themselves, and
incidentally over others, is the easiest thing in the world, far easier
than to lift a weight or change the colour of a leaf on a tree.
For the control recommended in this book no new muscles or nerves have to
be supplied, nor do any actual muscles or ligaments or tendons have to
be exercised or otherwise strengthened. It would be hard to go through a
daily dozen or (gross) of calisthenic exercises and still harder, indeed
impossible, to make hair grow (or not grow) where it did not (or did)
before. But the procedure to be recommended in this book is more like
opening one’s eyes, and seeing that a vehicle is bearing down upon one
(or about to leave without one), than it is like walking in an ethical
treadmill and satisfying a sense of duty by monotonous repetition of
behaviour enforced from without.
For the control advocated here nothing is needed but a new picture of
love, uncorrupted by the ignorance of traditional lore and superstition.
What is needed is more creative imagination in married life, not spoiled
by cynicism or emasculated by fatalism. Control can be secured!