while marriage, regardless of whatever form it may assume, has always been mentioned in this book as unavoidably related to love, we must not blink the fact that marriage and love are two absolutely different things forced into frequent association by social and economic necessity.
love is an involuntary and compulsory craving which draws a male and a female into the closest possible union for the purpose of mutual sexual gratification, generally followed by conception and reproduction.
marriage a compromise. marriage on the other hand is merely a compromise between the positive individual cravings which demand the most complete and frequent gratification of the love urge, regardless of its consequences, and the negative feeling which causes the community to shirk all possible responsibilities incurred by the individual,[pg 316] among others, the support of pregnant or lactating females and of helpless infants.
unless the community owns mother and child and can exploit their labor or receive their cash value (slavery system), it demands that their owner, the impregnator of the woman and procreator of the child, supply food and shelter for both.
marriage is also a compromise between two individual cravings which may not be synchronised, as the male's desire for the female may subside before her desire for him does, or reciprocally.
through the institution of marriage the community protects itself against new burdens directly by penalties (sentences against wife deserters or those who abandon children) and indirectly by protecting the mates against their own cravings for whose duration they are not responsible (laws against bigamy or adultery, etc.).
considering the artificial character of the marriage union, and at the same time the psychological importance of its durability as far as the mental health of the off-spring is concerned, one of the most pressing duties of the community (and one which it never performs), should be to devise all the possible ways and means whereby the sex crav[pg 317]ings of both mates could be helped to retain their freshness and strength as long as possible.
attractiveness an asset. the first thought which should be forced into the minds of modern men and women is that attractiveness is a positive asset not only to woman but to man. in classic greece, a man could not be merely good, he had to be beautiful too. by "good" the greek meant "fit" but in the compound word which implied both qualities, kalos, beauty came first.
cravings being awakened and kept alive by certain fetishes, the individual should be trained to recognize his and his mate's fetishism and to make all possible efforts to retain, if necessary by artificial means, the fetishes which lead to the awakening of erotism between him and his mate.
the average man or woman of forty is a sorry sight. yet a little intelligence would compel them to retain or regain the physical idiosyncrasies they exhibited at the time of their marriage.
too many women consider it sinful to devote much time to their physical appearance and the care of their body. in a man, any attempt to make himself attractive is considered in stupid middle-class circles as a stigma of effeminacy.
[pg 318]
the "pretty" man has always been despised by men and women, and endocrinology has confirmed their judgment by revealing to us that he is a glandular weakling. between the pretty man and the attractive man, however, there is a far cry.
while the american movies, generally speaking, are catering to the weak-minded and the unimaginative, they have, in their search for a bait where-with to catch audiences, rendered mankind a signal service by starring the kind of man which would have passed muster in ancient greece, beautiful and fit.
athletic, if not acrobatic, movie idols present to the female part of the audience a complex of physical qualities which women will gradually demand from their mates. it is regrettable that women should not attend prize fights in large numbers, for the sight of the godlike participants in those affrays would force them to institute enlightening comparisons between professional fighters and the average male.
besides retaining or regaining their fetishes, human beings should make a special effort not to let those fetishes lose their power.
the worst foe of married happiness. balzac in his "physiology of marriage" says that the[pg 319] married have to wage a constant fight with a monster which devours everything: habit. every stimulus, as we know, pleasant or unpleasant, loses its power when applied continuously or too frequently.
it is only for the first minute or so that the ice cold shower causes our naked skin to tingle with excitement. as soon as the reaction sets in and the capillaries fill with red blood, the pleasant sensation of the water needles becomes dulled.
after holding our hand for a minute in hot water, we no longer realise the high temperature of the liquid and in order to continue to experience the feeling of heat we must continually raise the temperature of the water.
and likewise we may grow so accustomed to one source of erotic stimulation that we become indifferent to it.
friendship may survive the death of sexual love, provided the sex desire has died in both mates at the same time. when desire dies off in the wife first and is not replaced by aversion, the situation may be very simple for she can still satisfy her more ardent mate and derive some gratification therefrom.
when the man's desire dies first, on the other[pg 320] hand, there may arise unpleasant complications. a man may be impotent with a woman whom he loves tenderly but no longer desires sexually and yet be potent with some other woman to whom he is not completely "accustomed."
jealousy on the part of the wife may then prevent the advent of the platonic friendship which is not uncommon between old married mates, altho montaigne denies the possibility of its existence.
modern mates, conscious of that danger, have now and then devised ways and means to combat balzac's monster.
not so long ago a well-known woman writer announced that she was planning to marry a certain man with whom, however, she did not intend to live day after day. the experiment has many chances of success if jealousy does not complicate the situation.
i suggested to reporters last summer, when two famous artists parted company, that their union might have been of longer duration if one of them had lived at the plaza while the other was stopping at the st. regis.
[pg 321]
married people should separate for periods of variable duration in order that a fresh stimulation may emanate from their fetishes when they meet again. by leading more individual lives and having separate sets of friends, they would, besides, bring to each other a new sort of mental pabulum and stimulation day after day. conversation becomes futile and unnecessary between a husband and wife who always pay and receive calls together, attend the same spectacles and hence always see the same side of life. now and then we read of couples who separate and a few years later remarry. those few years spent apart from each other mean for both new experiences which enrich their mind and their conversation and make them again interesting to each other.
the play function of love. another factor which the monstrous hypocrisy of puritanism makes very difficult to discuss openly and honestly and which wrecks many promising unions is the ignorance, more common than we suspect among married couples, of what maurice parmelee in his "personality and behavior" has called the play function of love, a term which has been given a broader meaning by havelock ellis in an article for the medical review of reviews for march 1921.
the average man or woman is tragically ignorant of the mission of sex.
the average man, as ellis writes, has two aims:[pg 322] "to prove that he is a man and to relieve a sexual tension.
"he too often considers himself, from traditional habits, as the active partner in love and his own pleasure as the prime motive of the sex communion.
"his wife, naturally adopts the complementary attitude, regards herself as the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible.
"she has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her whole nature remains ill-developed and unharmonized, and that she is incapable of bringing her personality (having indeed no achieved personality to bring) to bear effectively on the problems of society and the world around her."
i have described in "sex happiness" the tragedies which result from that form of ignorance, especially the tragedy of the unsatisfied wife, her restlessness, her gradual dislike of her mate, her curiosity as to what feelings she might experience if married to another man, when some other man seems to awaken her erotism, and then the dilemma, repression leading to neurosis, or indulgence leading into the divorce court.
[pg 323]
psychoanalysis to the rescue. "in this matter," ellis writes, "we may learn a lesson from the psychoanalysts of today without any implication that psychoanalysis is necessarily a desirable or even possible way of attaining the revelation of love. the wiser psychoanalysts insist that the process of liberating the individual from outer and inner influences that repress or deform his energies and impulses is effected by removing the inhibitions on the free play of his nature.
"it is a process of education in the true sense, not of the suppression of natural impulses nor even of the instillation of sound rules and maxims for their control, not of the pressing in but of the leading out of the individual's special tendencies.
"it removes inhibitions, even inhibitions that were placed upon the individual, or that he consciously or unconsciously placed upon himself, with the best moral intentions, and by so doing it allows a larger and freer and more natively spontaneous morality to come into play.
"it has this influence above all in the sphere of sex, where such inhibitions have been most powerfully laid on the native impulses, where the natural tendencies have been most surrounded by taboos and terrors, most tinged with artificial stains of impurity and degradation derived from alien and antiquated traditions.
[pg 324]
"thus the therapeutical experience of the psychoanalysts reinforce the lessons we learn from physiology and psychology and the intimate experiences of life."
wounded egotism. love in marriage is endangered from another quarter: the greatest foe of sexual desire, as i have stated several times in this book, is wounded egotism.
a perfect matrimonial adjustment does not mean the modification of either mate's personality. we have seen in the chapters on glands that the normal personality is practically inadaptable, that is, nothing short of serious sickness or a surgical operation can transform an active person into a sluggish one and vice versa.
it is only the neurotic personality which can be adapted by the removal of certain unconscious fears which prevent it from attaining social and biological balance and happiness.
all psychoanalysis does in such cases is to teach the patient to accept everything which is biologically normal in his personality.
we must then have an absolute respect for personality in ourselves and others. we must find a socially acceptable outlet for all our idiosyncrasies, a difficult, but never impossible task.
[pg 325]
lack of an outlet means a neurotic disturbance. the so-called adaptable people are those who succeed in repressing temporarily their cravings and denying their existence, a result which they attain at the cost of much suffering to themselves and, indirectly, to their environment.
democracy in the home is the prerequisite of every perfect matrimonial adjustment.
the autocratic government of the home by a male bully of a female nag leads to either a revolution (divorce) or to the destruction of human material after a bitter strife, (neurotic ailments).
the bullied wife and the henpecked husband fill the offices of neurologists, gynaecologists, psychoanalysts and sexologists. this is the way in which the wounded ego of the defeated mate avenges itself.
the defeated mate becomes sexually disabled.
the results of maladjustment of the mates are strikingly summed up by kempf in his monumental work "psychopathology":
[pg 326]
"upon marriage a subtle if not overt struggle occurs between the mates for the dominant position in the contract. the big, aggressive wife and the timid, little husband attest to the importance of organic superiority in the adjustment, but the average marriage does not show such organic differences. the sadistic or masochistic husband and the masochistic or sadistic wife will certainly adjust to please their reciprocating cravings, no matter what influence this may have upon their children, and a sadistic wife and sadistic husband, although both are cruel in their pleasures, will divorce each other on the charge of the other being cruel; but it is the commonplace adjustment which interests us most, because it is most predominant.
"nature places an unerring punishment upon the woman, who, by incessantly using every whim, scheme or artifice, finally succeeds in dominating her husband. by forcing him to submit to her thousand and one demands and coercions, within a few years, he unconsciously becomes a submissive type and loses his sexual potency with her as the love-object. if he does not have secret love interests which stimulate him to strive for power, he finally loses his initiative and sexual potency completely and must live always at a commonplace level, the servant of more virile men: the counterpart of the subdued impotent males of the animal herd.
"his more aggressive, selfish mate, if periodically heterosexually erotic, will become neurotic if her moral restraints are insurpassable, or seek a new mate whom she will again attempt to subdue. never is she able to realise that her selfishness makes her sexually unattractive. the psychopathologist meets many such women whose husbands have evaded domination by secretly depending upon the affections of another more suitably adjusted woman."
[pg 327]
in "the new horizon in love and life," mrs. havelock ellis writes "it is more than probable that the evolved relationship of the future will be monogamy—but a monogamy wider and more beautiful than the present caricature of it, as the sea is wider and more delicious than a duck pond.
"the lifelong, faithful love of one man for one woman is the exception and not the rule. the law of affinity being as subtle and as indefinable as the law of gravitation, we may, by and by, find it worth while to give it its complete opportunity in those realms where it can manifest itself most potently. we are on the wrong bridge if we imagine that laxity is the easiest way to freedom. the bridge which will bear us must be strong enough to support us while experiments are tried.
"what is the gospel in this matter of sexual emancipation for men and women in the new world where love has actually come of age? it is surely the complete economic independence of women. while man is economically free and woman still a slave, either physically, financially or spiritually, mankind as a whole must act as if blindness, maimness and deafness constituted health.
[pg 328]
"the complete independence of husband and wife is the gospel of the new era of marriage. this is the actual matter which philosophers, parents, philanthropists and pioneers so often ignore when teaching the new ideals of morality. when a woman is kept by a man she is not a free individuality either as child, wife or mistress. imagine for a moment a man kept by a woman as women are kept by men and a sense of humor illuminates the absurdity of the situation between any class of evolved human beings."
as a clever patient of mine whom i regret i cannot mention by name said one day: "married happiness, to be lasting, requires more than sexual cooperation of both mates, it must resolve itself into cooperative egotism."
