THE NEW MARRIAGE
Certain it is that the chrysalis, man, is emerging from the
cocoon of tradition.—DR. ROBIE.
§ 199
The new husband is the man who realizes that the type of passion which
he has idealized to himself as appropriate for himself is logically
quite as appropriate for his wife. Quite as logically he may deduce
that if there is, therefore, to be not only no double standard with
regard to promiscuity, but also no double standard with regard to the
rights to erotic exaltation, he may create a single standard by means
of reducing the number of his love episodes to a minimum of intercourse
for procreation only. Many men have done this or nearly this. But all
who try it find that there are two sets of difficulties in the way, the
difficulty of attaining this semi-ascetic end from the purely volitional
point of view, and the difficulty, or more exactly the detriment, which
modern science is beginning to demonstrate as inevitably coming to the
psychic as well as the physical powers of the ascetic individual.
Also the single standard idea is to be transferred to the degree to
which each partner carries, and is carried, in the love episode. Truly a
double standard in this respect is little better than a double standard
in promiscuity. There is no good reason why it should be right for a
husband to reach his erotic acme at each love episode and wrong, or even
indifferent, for the wife. The true single standard of married life
implies, therefore, that the same standard of erotic gratification should
be for both husband and wife. Man has no biological privilege here over
woman. What is right for man must also be right for woman. So we see that
the new husband is the one who recognizes the single standard of monogamy
and also that of hologamy which provides for the wife’s erotic acme as
well as for the husband’s.
§ 200
Woman fundamentally and biologically calls for man to be the stronger
to impregnate by force the impregnable fortress of her femininity, and
he who fails to do this fails to make a good husband. The training for
husbandship, irrespective of wealth or social position, should start from
this fundamental principle of masculine control of the marital situation.
This control should begin at the altar, and never weaken, never relax for
a moment, except at the times when the wife is by her erotic emotions at
the climax of the love episode incapable of witnessing its relaxation, at
least of envying her husband.
After a long courtship in which there has been much worship of the woman
by the man, there may tend to be preserved, to hang over, a sort of
worship habit in the husband; but this should give place to an inflexible
attitude and a positive aggressive treatment, Petruchio-like, yet only in
the erotic sphere, increasing in power as the years go by. Woman will
test it hourly to detect any weakening, jealous of the strength to be
handed down to her offspring. It is unconscious in her. She cannot help
it.
In the modern woman with a vocation, to which there cannot be a possible
objection if it does not exclude her proper maternity, the relation to
her husband must still be one of emotional subservience. She cannot
control him emotionally without making herself a mother-imago to him.
He cannot, even unconsciously, accept this control of himself by
her, without regressing to the condition of being dominated by the
mother-imago, without being to her as her child and not her man.
Modern marriage must be an entirely new and different thing from most
previous marital relations. Mastery over the woman must remain, if
marriage is to continue; but it must be a spiritual mastery, a love
mastery in place of the old Rome-inherited legal, economic and physical
mastery. Thus the poor husband of a rich wife need lose no mastery,
nor need the non-professional husband of a professional wife, nor the
unintellectual husband of an intellectual wife, the uneducated husband of
an educated wife.
Mastery or control does not consist any more in the regulation by the
man of any egoistic-social activities of the woman, the dictating of
what she shall do or wear or think, nor in the acts of the man himself
consciously designed to steer her this way or that. Mastery does consist
in what the husband, and the husband alone, can make the wife feel. It
does consist in the establishment and maintenance of a sense on her
part of belonging to him, which he can develop even though granting her
in the egoistic-social sphere, the most absurd license—the _Hörigkeit_
(mentioned by Freud) based on the peculiar intensity with which he
gratified after awakening it in early married life, her erotic need.
§ 201
Possibly the great increase in the number of divorces is due to the
increasing expectation of something unutterably fine in marriage and an
inevitable disillusionment resulting from concrete experience. There
would be no divorce on the grounds of adultery if the married woman felt
that her paramour could give her no joy remotely resembling what her
husband could. The adultery of the man, too, comes from disappointment.
Where there is absolutely complete satisfaction the motive for adultery
cannot exist.
The man or woman with conscious and unconscious passion of the one
developed into a habit may be attracted by other women but the other
woman’s attractiveness will not be as great as his wife’s. And deflection
in either husband or wife, if they think at all precisely on their
action, must be quite repugnant to them in every way. The uncontrolled
man who does not master his wife’s erotic emotions is disappointed in her
and seeks his supreme gratification with another woman who appears to be
able to give him what he thinks he cannot get from his wife in the way of
appreciation, sympathy or understanding.
If this is the man’s attitude then, of course, he cannot have grasped
the idea of the higher monogamy, which is not that of getting but of
giving. No man in any degree cognizant of the concept of true mating
can fail to find even the woman to whom he happens to be married, able
to receive if he practises properly the technique of presentation. He
must have found certain qualities in her before he married her, which
his awkwardness in presenting himself have perturbed, and he can now
review these and work upon them until he is utterly accepted. For his
presentation of himself and his service to her in the worship of Eros
are the only means toward his adequately virile satisfaction. _Credite
expertis._
No one who has had prosperity in the egoistic-social sphere, who has had
a comfortable home, for example, will choose adversity, will thereafter
prefer to live in a tenement, noisy, squalid. No man who has experienced
the greater profundities of virile control of the total erotic situation
will choose to give any less of himself to his wife. No wife who has
received from her husband the maximum that a man can give, which is
himself—that is, his supreme control of himself and of her—will choose to
look for anything greater or higher, for it does not exist even in the
most extravagant imagination.
§ 202
In the marriage of the future we must make sure that the art of love is
thoroughly learned by the husband. Without it, he has only a small chance
of making a successful marriage. And we must see to it that this new art
of love be not like Ovid’s the adulterer’s art of winning a woman away
from her home, but the husband’s art of retaining her in it.
This will require a readjustment, possibly of the concept of “home.” The
home meant here is not in any sense the material house and furniture and
embellishments. The home is the family, to which all the members should
belong in a sense far more spiritual than the average. The truly mated
couple belong to the family forever and to the children, until the latter
marry and make families of their own. Any deflection from the purely
hologamous ideal on the part of either the husband-father or wife-mother
is a misfortune to the latter, but unequivocally the fault of the former.
The marriage of the future, if it is to follow the single-standard
pattern of equal joy for equal mutuality, will be in no way inferior to
any type of so-called romantic marriage of today. It will have all the
totality of fusion of the individual’s body and soul, all the fusion of
the personalities of the two mates. It will have all the finality and
indissolubility now wished for it by the present generation whose marital
relations begin to crumble in a year or less. It will never degenerate
into a situation where life seems not worth living, but will be the only
circumstance in which life is consciously and perennially known, as well
as believed and felt, to be thoroughly worth while.
By their confusion of the two levels of control women lose much of the
happiness that would come to them from the direct control exercised over
them by men, on the erotic level. Into the love episode egoistic-social
impulses, being the uninvited guest at a feast, only intrude. Women’s
sphere of active control is limited, on all rational grounds, to the work
in the world which they choose for themselves apart from being wives.
It is equally true, too, that if the erotic life is to be rationally
developed in both partners the husband will have to keep carefully
separated the egoistic-social in his life from the erotic. There is much
talk about the ability of a woman to be a mother, which tacitly implies
being a housewife, and at the same time to be a professional woman or to
do anything whatever of an egoistic-social nature outside of her home.
The idea never seems to have occurred to anybody that in an equitable
marriage at least, not to mention an ideal one, the husband has any part
to play in the construction of that spiritual situation which should
constitute the home. The father really has as vital a part to play in the
home as the mother. There is no perfect home that does not contain these
two absolutely equally unifying factors. “What is home without a father?”
is quite as pertinent a question as the other trite one.
This does not for a moment imply that the duties of the father and the
mother in the material home should be the same. This would give only a
literal verbal significance to the statement that a man’s duty is quite
as much toward his home as is a woman’s. If we were simply using words
that sounded reasonable we might as well repeat the oft expressed and
seemingly perfectly balanced retort of woman to her husband: “If I have
to _bear_ the child, why on earth shouldn’t _you_ care for it?”
§ 203
To illustrate with a concrete example the utter helplessness of some of
the finest women, the following excerpt is made, with his permission,
from a letter received by Dr. Robie:
“The man whom I finally married came into my life as an intellectual
wonder. I marvelled at his knowledge and his worldly poise.... Whenever I
pleaded for consideration, kindness, he would say: ‘Haven’t you a home,
clothes, money, a baby? What more do you want?’ or ‘Haven’t I told you
once that I love you? Can’t you take that for granted?’
“No gentleness, no petting, just hardness and the greatest conceit over
his own personality and ability.
“I found at dances that other men could thrill me, and one man in
particular.... He never knew it.
“I got the reputation of being a perfect mother, and a beauty, and my
spirit never has been broken; but my faith is broken. My love is as dead
as last year’s leaves; and I scorn men who stop being lovers on their
wedding night.
“Health, enthusiasm, good nature, big sense of humour, beauty, ideal
birth inheritance, magnetism, yes, and passion—for I am not cold, but
_very_ impulsive and affectionate—all this lost to the right man, and the
wrong one quite content, apparently, in his worldly successes, and with
a cultured wife who does not bother him, and keeps his noisy brood of
children at a distance.
“This comes from a bursting heart. It is true I am a success as a mother;
and the world thinks I am in all ways. Yet that greatest of all things,
LOVE, is denied me.”
§ 204
The father’s part in the home is something, however, far more
hypersomatic than that, more spiritual. The truly husbanded wife will
make the egoistic-social aspects of home-keeping so much her own business
that she will tend to appropriate more than she should really have. And
the thoughtless man will let her and wonder why she is tired and cross.
If rugs have to be beaten and windows washed, and there is no money to
hire a man to do it, the wife will do it, frequently, and the husband,
who does not husband his wife’s health and beauty will let her. And so
on up the egoistic-social scale till we reach the millionaire who might
do certain things for his wife much more acceptably than hirelings, but
dissociates himself more and more from her.
The management of the children is really an egoistic-social affair, in
which some men are much better able to plan, and execute plans than
are most women. The management of very young children in the home is
something that no _paterfamilias_ can afford to leave entirely to women.
This is by all odds the most important part of the child’s life.
It does not mean that the banker or politician should spend hour after
hour in the nursery, though, indeed, he should know pretty well what
goes on there. The nature of the personal contacts the child gets in
the nursery is a determining factor in many cases, in the way in which
he will later behave in his marital existence. In the nursery, meaning
by that any locality where the child spends most of his playtime and
sleeping time, he gets the experiences from which later he may develop
neuroses, phobias, and other emotional disorders. He forms there usually
his mother-imago, for even if he belongs to the class of children who
never see their own mothers except on the rarest occasions, he will form
his mother ideal from his hired nurse, or from any other woman with whom
he comes into close contact.
Here then, the egoistic-social trends of the parents play an important
rôle in determining the erotic life of the child. The egoistic-social
pressure exerted on one or both parents withdraws them from their
children, and partly or wholly orphans them. Many a child’s father is no
more personal than a checking bank.
Not only, therefore, does the absorption of the parents by
egoistic-social trends diminish the chances of their own erotic
development as husband and wife, a development that takes time, energy
and imagination, but it deprives their children of the proper environment
in which to develop the germs of future wholesome erotism.
Parents and children should spend a certain amount of time in each
other’s company during which they do nothing but love each other all
around and have a jolly good time together. It is just as important
for the parents to banish egoistic-social claims for short periods and
actually loaf and fool around with the children as it is for the children
to have a taste of adult idling company. Such, for example, is a real
picnic or camping trip or ocean voyage, or any situation that brings
parents and children together.
§ 205
It is important, too, for every woman to keep clearly separated in her
mind and in her action the two levels, egoistic-social and erotic. Only
then is she in a satisfactory position to become a wife in a higher sense
than that in which most women are wives, and her becoming a mother need
interfere in no way with her remaining a wife to her husband.
It is therefore to the advantage of man to realize that, however much he
may value his wife’s clear intuition in egoistic-social matters, he is
to be sure about their utter exclusion from matters purely erotic. A man
can never fall in love with a conventionally so-called unattractive woman
solely because she has a good business head. If any man should think
so, he would find, on closer analysis, that, if he was really in love,
his motive was truly erotic. If he cannot find any really erotic factor
in his attitude toward her, his union with her can never be a complete
marriage.
He has confused the two levels. He cannot love her _because_ she can
manage a library or a bond broker’s office or an insurance agency, any
more than he can love her really because she knows how to make fudge. He
may be attracted by the fudge. He is undoubtedly attracted unconsciously
by other factors truly erotic in her character. Otherwise he would be
more prudent to marry the fudge rather than the girl.
Similarly if the woman thinks she attracts by her business or culinary
ability she is confusing levels. There are some women who unfortunately,
because erroneously, believe they have little or no erotic attraction.
Plain in face, not well formed, possibly under-weight, complexions not
clear, they think that by sedulously following egoistic-social trends
they can make an appeal to other people and particularly to men. They
fail to see that these trends have hardly anything to do with love,
that, once they love, their form improves, that the homeliest face,
once lighted by the fire of love, has a beauty all its own, pure and
irresistible.
The same is true of unloving, unillumined, unfired men. Judging
erroneously from a confusion of the two levels, they fail to see not only
that erotic trends are the strongest and most universal in the world, but
that being the fundamentally vital trends they are almost inexhaustible
and provide the untapped energy which the egoistic-social thinking of
these diffident men makes them fear to draw upon.
The mathematical exactness of the comparison of men on the
egoistic-social level makes many a man think his erotic impulses are
similarly inferior. He should ponder well upon the prodigality of nature,
remembering that he, too, is part of nature.
§ 206
Unrestrained nature is most prodigal. The thousands of ova and millions
of spermatozoa produced in every woman and man show that the analogy is
false that is drawn between the human body and a mere container like a
basket. Anything with life cannot be exhausted until life has gone, and
yet through asceticism the secretions can be rendered great or small
or almost non-existent. Men can make eunuchs of themselves by force of
will, yet their egoistic-social performances are not improved but rather
impoverished by the process.
Men should train themselves to produce, which consists in being lavish of
self in every manner. The richest are those who give most. The miser is
the poorest man in the world and the most miserable.
Fear of giving self is the fear of losing self. What most men fear if
they love their wives too much is that they will impoverish themselves
and enrich their wives, thus making their wives contemptuous of their
resultant poverty. But the poorest man or woman is the one who has not
begun to love, and many are such even in the married state.
And they begin to enrich themselves even more than each other, when they
give each to other the uttermost that is in them.
Giving is the only thing that produces fertility of giving. It is
tapping the inexhaustible, the only way in which to unite oneself to the
infinite. Withholding is closing up the gate to universal strength and
power.
Control is not annihilation or denial. It is direction of an endless
stream of energy. If the energy is not delivered it cannot be directed
and therefore cannot be controlled.
The tragedy of present-day marital life lies in the deception men
practise on themselves by believing that annihilation is a kind of
control.
The facts of the intimate marital relations of most couples are too
unlovely to be welcomed by most people, but in order to progress it is
necessary to face them.
In the new marriage the husband, therefore, will relinquish certain of
the egoistic-social spheres of action and will confine his attention
solely to those most closely associated with the erotic. He will assume
the responsibility for these.
§ 207
Trial marriage is little more than a method of testing man’s control in
the erotic sphere. It implies that if a man is found lacking in control
over one woman, he may be tried with another, in the hope that with the
second up to the _n_th he may find a woman whom he can control. But as
stated elsewhere in this book the probability of an uncontrolled man’s
acquiring control by a superficial trial and error method is almost nil.
Science has not a word to say against permanent marriage if the pair are
really compatible. What constitutes compatibility, however, is much more
a mental attitude on the part of the husband. A man that thinks he has
to have a special, peculiar type of woman for a wife, or because of a
bringing up in an excessively romantic family thinks there is only one
woman in the world, specially born for him, who alone can make him happy
in marriage, or who thinks he has found her when he has fallen in love
at first sight, assumes no responsibility for his own happiness, but
fatalistically waits for destiny to provide him with a suitable spouse.
“Spouse” is derived from Latin _spondeo_ which is at the root of the
word _response_, and means “to promise solemnly.” This refers to what the
person confidently expects to _get_, not himself contribute to the union.
But it has been clear to the seers of all ages that giving is the only
true getting.
On the basis of giving, almost any woman can be made a wife, but never in
the sense of spouse if it has its ancient meaning of a person bound to
give something.
If a young man is given the proper training in the right way, which shows
him that the most intensely physical contacts are emotionally worthless
without the spiritual factor in the truly erotic, and that the intimacies
of marital life are far more determined by hypersomatic (spiritual) facts
than by physical ones, that he has the privilege of making his married
life as romantic as he wishes or can leave it quite prosaic and dull; if
he knows this, even a provisional marriage entered into with a woman not
positively distasteful to him can be made a triumphant success.
The proviso, however, will be made by most people that there must be an
original rapport between the two. It is the unequivocal position of this
book, on the contrary, that the rapport, even if it never existed, can be
created by the husband, by means of his own conscious creative power.
§ 208
This implies neither that the rapport is solely a physical one nor that
it is based on solely physical factors. Nor does it imply that a perfect
marital love that has all the qualities of the romantic may not, by
the proper behaviour on the husband’s part, be progressively developed
as the years pass. Indeed, the fully matured love of at least a quarter
of a century’s duration is the only marital love that has any claim
to be called romantic. In the young, love is not romantic but may be
spectacular, in its expression, or in the egoistic-social circumstances
which surround it, but the only perfect love of a man and a woman is the
one that has the growth of years.
If a man knowing the true technique which is more spiritual (more
hypersomatic) than physical in every instance, though impossible without
the complete combination of physical and spiritual, chooses any woman
whatever of his own free will, and uses with her the real love technique
of word and deed, he cannot fail to find in her his erotic complement, if
she be really a woman.
The choice, it is admitted, is the work largely of his unconscious. The
unconscious is an absolutely accurate registering apparatus; and as such
is the real foundation of the choice of a mate.
But it should not for a moment be forgotten that the unconscious
mechanisms that present this woman as more attractive than that to a man
are only the foundation of the edifice of his marital love which it is
his triumph to build with his own hands.
And it should equally well be remembered that the erotic control is
his, and will remain his, if the marriage is to prove happy; also that
the erotic control is more spiritual than physical, though it can never
endure without the physical.
§ 209
The duty of marriage is the procreation of healthy children. The
privilege and pleasure of marriage is what Havelock Ellis has called the
play side of love.
If the husband does not secure and by a superior knowledge of love insist
on securing in his wife this essential of human marriage, his marriage is
only legal, only social, and has no love instinct back of it. It is not
an erotic union. Erotic unions are the only healthy ones.
Erotic unions are the only healthy ones not merely in the sense of
health-giving to the partners, but also in the sense of having themselves
a healthy growth in progressively embracing all human activities, in
which the partners are concerned in egoistic and social lines, embracing
them in such a way that the love instinct increases its control over the
ego instinct. This increase is the real object of a love marriage, not
increase of wealth, honour, distinction, and experience of the world but
increase of the dominance of love over self.
§ 210
Possibly this dependence of the woman on the man to unfold her accounts
for man’s instinctive desire to marry a virgin. Unconsciously he may
imagine that to make her most his own, she should have been influenced
erotically by no other man.
Whether or not the future development of the general attitude toward
marriage will include an insistence on the woman’s being a virgin when
she enters the marital state, there are still some considerations
concerning both the physical and the psychical condition of virginity,
both of men and of women, that are pertinent today, and that seem
advisable to take up at this point.
§ 211
The study of the unconscious throws an important sidelight upon the
matter of the termination of physical virginity of women.
It has been clearly shown that this termination when, as is frequently
the case, it is accompanied by sudden and severe pain on the rupture
of the hymen, is the cause of a revulsion of feeling on the woman’s
part, utterly incommensurate with the actual intensity and duration
of the pain, a feeling also of which she never is, and possibly never
becomes, directly conscious; but, if the pain is caused by the action
of the husband, it is the cause of a resentment which, in the wife’s
unconscious, is ever after associated with her husband.
From this point of view it would seem more felicitous if that unconscious
association of ideas could be made in her mind with some other man, e.g.,
the family doctor, if it is an inevitable association and absolutely
uncontrollable by the wife, as all deeply unconscious mental processes
are. It would seem that a man would profit by not being the particular
man associated in his wife’s unconscious with a painful incident that
cuts so deep. This applies to the average uninstructed man but not to
the adept or even inexperienced man who is willing and able to act
intelligently and profit by the knowledge now available about how to
avoid this one of the many mischances that may occur in the case of the
virgin episode.
This phenomenon of the unconscious resentment due to the forcible and
painful termination of merely physical virginity is recognized in the
frequently happy second married life of women who have lost their first
husbands, and in the customs of some savage tribes in which no woman
becomes a wife until she has been deflowered by the official appointed by
the tribe for that special purpose.
The inference from these facts is not necessarily that a man will be more
happy with a wife who comes to him “impure” or widowed; though this may
be the case. The inference is on the other hand that the man, if he knows
enough, will be able in the very first love episode so to act that the
bride inflicts any necessary pain on herself, and not he on her; making
all the difference in the world to her, because in this case, never,
even in her own unconscious, can she lay up against her husband this
cause of resentment. The technically instructed husband thus gains an
initial prestige with his wife and with her unconscious, which enormously
increases his erotic control of her emotions—the _sine qua non_ of a
felicitous marriage, that essential condition for fully functioning adult
human life.
§ 212
Women are unable to control or direct their own development in the
erotic sphere up to the point of greatest exaltation. They are perforce
required to be developed by men. But, in from fifty to seventy per
cent of marriages, men are too uninterested or too ignorant to develop
their wives’ erotism to this point, and, of course, to develop their own
erotism to the necessary degree of self-control whereby they can secure
the total erotic relaxation of their wives.
So that when we say that men are more virginal than women we imply a
responsibility on the husband’s part, and none whatever on the wife’s
part, for the proper erotic development which alone constitutes the basis
of a permanent monogamy.
That is the reason for saying that in the love episode control is the
husband’s organically, fundamentally, biologically. The husband reader
of this book should ask himself whether he has exercised the adequate
amount of control in the erotic sphere. Has he left his wife, the mother
of his children, in the condition of being psychically a virgin? If he
has, he must realize that he, too, is in a sense, himself a virgin. This
signifies primarily that because his wife’s erotism is left undeveloped,
his own is too. Undeveloped erotism is no secure bond, no perfect
assurance, of a true monogamy.
He will need to take the matter into his own hands and truly marry his
wife by means of fully developing his own and her erotism. This need of
marrying one’s own wife is the greatest need of the present day. It can
be fulfilled only by more knowledge and more (truly erotic) passion on
the part of the husband.
The husband, therefore, who has not in this sense married his own wife,
is illogical in thinking that there is any justice or beauty or poetry or
romance in any attempted affiliation, liaison or other intimate relation
with any other woman. On the other hand, the husband who has married his
wife in this sense, will neither seek nor need the intimacy of any other
woman than his wife.
The phantasied happiness with any other woman rests solely on the thought
that the erotic development of the other would be easier for him, or that
it would be unnecessary. If it is unnecessary, it has been accomplished
by some other man; for true mutual erotic relations are not attained by
a woman alone or by two women, man being the only developer of woman’s
erotism.
He may think indeed that some extra-marital woman actually loves him,
and that his wife does not. This may be true, if he is fully developed
himself, has made sincere attempts for years to develop his wife and, in
spite of his own best thought and advice of erotologists, has found that
she is definitely ineducable. This is an exceedingly rare case.
It may _appear_ that the extra-marital woman loves him, and that he loves
her; but the experience of many centuries has shown that, except in the
rarest of instances, the woman is ignorant of her own true feelings and
that the attempt on the man’s part to develop her erotically would be a
failure.
If his own desire for the extra-marital woman is conditioned, as it so
often is, on the mentally autoerotic nature of his own satisfactions,
which his lack of success with his wife has, in most cases, amply proved,
his success in the adulterous union is not likely to be any greater. He
will be most likely to expect an easier conquest in the extra-marital
liaison than in the marital relation. His going from the marital one to
one fancied easier is an evidence of his mental autoerotism.
§ 213
In conclusion it may be said that the feeling on the part of any critic
of modern civilization that marriage has been a failure applies only to
the facts of the imperfect carrying out of the ideal of monogamy. We
may remind such critics that, like Christianity, monogamy (in the sense
of hologamy or the total physical and psychical fusion of man and wife)
cannot be called a failure, because in the vast majority of persons,
it simply _has not been given a fair trial_. External, conscious,
superficial fidelity is not true hologamy any more than lip service is
Christianity; and, as a whole, civilized peoples have not yet succeeded
in attaining faith either in the one or in the other.