§ 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 nth 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.