WHY WIVES ARE UNFAITHFUL
It may, and I expect will, be said that I am looking at this question of faithfulness in marriage from the man’s side only. This is not because I do not see and sympathise with the woman’s position. I am thinking really just as much of one partner as of the other. What I wish to do is to focus attention. For this reason, I am insisting upon the fact, of the wife’s coldness as being most often the first cause which drives the husband from his affection and his duty. I do this because it is just the real cause that is almost always neglected, unrealised, in particular, by women themselves.
Women have been taught to believe, and do really feel, that by sexual unfaithfulness a husband does them the cruellest possible wrong that a man can do to a woman.
It is rare to find a woman who is not sexually jealous. To possess and to hold, even when she has ceased to desire the possession, is a quality that is exceedingly common in wives. And our iniquitous divorce laws, with their obsession with sexual offences, help to maintain this view of marriage.
But is the man ever wholly to blame? It is so easy to talk self-righteously of the unfaithfulness of men—of their polygamous nature and their attraction to wild love.
I never heard such nonsense. Men are the most faithful creatures alive. After all, almost in every case, the man has given away only what his wife has shown him she does not want for herself. As long as she desires him, indeed, often, as long as she will put up with him, her man will stick to her—yes, stick with the closeness of the proverbial burr.
Most English wives always are acquiescent, rather than passionate in the sexual embrace. Even when in love, they are shy and often unresponsive. Hiding what they feel, rarely showing their husbands that they want them with any real desire. Then, after a few years of marriage, his embraces are either evaded or repulsed, if not, they are suffered as a duty.
Everyone who does not blink facts, knows that the vast majority of marriages are unhappy owing to the coldness of the wife. Very often this starts from the beginning of marriage. The wife is disappointed: she finds the husband different from the lover of her dreams.
In the story of Beauty and the Beast we have material out of which part of the great sex difficulty can be explained. In the fairy story, the husband, who before marriage looks like a beast, after marriage, becomes a prince. In real life the story is inverted. There is a deluding force in the mere skin and limbs of those of the opposite sex at the time when maturity is reached which may give princely attributes to those who would be seen as beasts at other times. The prince seen as a beast after marriage is a tragedy into which the romantic, ignorant girl must beware of drifting. The man who most boldly plays up to the romantic part expected of him, reciprocating to the perhaps unconscious encouragement of the girl—is not the man who will be most agreeable to live with. I believe there is real danger in the sentimental view of love that is common to most girls. They do not know the poverty of feeling that loudly expressed sentiment may hide. The defect of many unfaithful lovers is not sensuality, but sentimentality. The lower types of lovers are strangely, almost incredibly sentimental.
It cannot, I think, be denied that sexual anaesthesia is present in many women and there would seem to be evidence that even where it is not present before experience of love, it arises after marriage. Any number of wives are unable to give themselves up to the sexual act in such a way as to derive from it real satisfaction and the gladness and health that it should give. This is a very grave matter. The evil would be less if these frigid women did not marry, but as a rule they do marry. It is a curious fact that women who sexually are cold, are sought as wives with greater frequency than are more passionate women, probably because their easily maintained reserve acts as a stimulus to the man’s desire. Men are persistently blind in these matters. They want response to their own love in their wives, but most of them are very much afraid of any woman who possesses the strong passion to enable her to give such response.
In short, as we found in the previous essay on unfaithful husbands, woman gains her fulfilment from the man when he gives her his child. But when she turns from him, she leaves him unsatisfied. The drama and the novel are burdened with this problem, which, indeed, intrudes itself on every hand.
We have, by our wrong ideals, for long been inducing an entirely perverted view, which regards physical desire as something of which women should be ashamed, and the sex act as a thing in itself degrading and even disgusting—the nasty side of love and of marriage, something to be submitted to, indeed, in order to bear children or for the sake of the loved man whose passions must be allowed, but not a thing for health and desire—for the delight and perfection of the woman herself.
This false view, I affirm again, is the blight that has been, and still is, the destroyer of sexual happiness and health. And this fear and denial of love; this separation between the passion allowed to the man and not allowed to the woman, is the serious side of this problem of marriage. For the hideous disguises and constant lying, too often made necessary to both the partners, owing to the wife’s entire failure to realise the physical necessities of love, makes domestic life an organised hypocrisy.
We fight and fight to be free. Yet ever the concealed antagonism lays fresh hold, upon both the husband and the wife. It crops up in many and curious ways, imposing its poison and destroying life—the deep, deep-hidden rage of unsatisfied love.
The need for love will not often allow itself to be inhibited without claiming payment. And if desire so frequently manifests itself in abnormal forms of the coarsest and commonest dissipation, this is almost always to be explained by some hindrance opposed to its normal expression. When women face facts and realise this truth, many things in the conduct of husbands will be clear that hitherto have been hidden from them.
There is, however, another aspect of this question which now must be considered. For to leave the matter here would be the greatest injustice. A further question must first be asked. Why is this coldness in women so prevalent? Why does the desire of even the loving wife so often cease towards her husband? It is a difficult question to answer. One reason has been given already. We have noted women’s false attitude to love; an attitude which, in so many cases, makes her ashamed of expressing openly the passions she feels. Yet there is, I think another and much deeper part of the truth that is fairly clear. Love is a more difficult thing for women than it is for men. Each man is able to enforce his sexual desire upon his wife at a time when she feels no desire, whereas she cannot gain her desire unless he gain his. We may, perhaps, trace back to this cause, many of the feelings of disharmony and waning of desire which injures the woman’s power to love.
I must follow this a little further. In marriage the husband, usually exercises his marital privileges when he wishes. He does not think sufficiently of, or understand sufficiently as he should, the wishes of his wife. For what she says must never be accepted as representing really what she wishes. It is very hard for any man to understand how almost impossible it is for a woman, if she is good, to be frank about sexual desire. Both our laws, and opinion and custom have strengthened the view—not usually openly acknowledged but usually felt—that the husband has the right to approach his wife when he desires. Her right is not equally considered, too often it is taken for granted that she has no desires or real sex-needs to be considered. The result is inescapable. The man’s passion finds relief while she remains unsatisfied. She is in just the same position as someone who is forced to eat a meal without appetite.
And inevitably this leaves her unresponsive, makes her irritable, capricious, and quite incomprehensible to her husband.
Of course, this disharmony, is not always conscious even to the woman herself, who usually fails quite to understand what is the matter or to connect her restless unhappiness with the stirrings of her unsatisfied love. The dyspeptic does not know that he wants food: he turns away from it. In the same way the woman turns away from love. She gives in to the inhibiting influences and accepts the abysmal misconception into which one sex has fallen in regard to the other.
This difference in the power for sexual sacrifice between the two sexes is, I have frequently thought, one of the gravest causes of misery in marriage. It will take very long to over come it. Only as we advance in refinement and knowledge of love can this antagonism in the sex act lessen, as the woman gains in frankness and the man comes to know how to arouse and keep aflame her desire.
For woman is passionate. There is no greater lie than the so often reiterated assumption that she “is naturally and organically frigid.”[4] We must remember that this view of woman’s coldness in love is of comparatively modern growth. Yet it is a lie that will take a real revolution in our moral ideas to uproot. It is, in large measure, at least, the result of our pretences—the horrible, grasping, destroying, back-wash of shams. It is the result of the way in which women have lived, with blinds drawn down on most of the unruly disturbance and elemental forces in love.
The wife whose love is turned away from her husband finds substitute satisfaction in her home and her children, if she has them, or, failing these, in dress and amusement and other outside interests; or in a lover, who gives her new hope of finding satisfaction in love. And the poor bewildered husband is quite unaware of the cause of this coldness. He cannot understand his wife’s unfaithfulness. He does not know that his unthinking acceptance of her subordination to his desire, however gladly given, is what has, and indeed must, exhaust the passion in her.
For I do not deny, as already I have stated, that sexual coldness is exceedingly common on the part of the wife to-day. What I do deny is that this is a natural condition; rather is it a symptom of the mistakes of our civilisation that have cheated women and men alike of health and happiness in love.
I affirm again, that this idea of coldness in love being natural to women is entirely false. Complete absence of satisfaction in love cannot be borne, especially when living in the close intimacy of married life, by any woman, through a period of years, without producing serious results on the body and the mind. It is in the blighting effects of this pseudo-celibacy that we must seek the cause of the sterility of so many married women’s lives.
Do I put this other side of the problem of marital-celibacy—the woman’s side—in a strong light. Yes I do, but I put it faithfully as I have come to know it from the facts I see daily around me.
It is hard to say how often, and how many wives have put from them the temptation to seek happiness in love at any price; no less hard is it to compute to what extent the transformation of this suppressed sexual passion is expended in passion in other channels. We see it in a hundred cases to-day. In every instance where passion is called for woman tends by her nature to be carried further than man.
There is, of course, no exact measuring in these matters, but who among us can dare to say that the harm done by the deprivation of love is greater in the lives of men than of women? I doubt not it is the other way. We hear so much of the sex-needs of husbands that we have become a little wearied. We accept so much for them as being right and natural, but who shall calculate the number of equally right and natural impulses that women have resisted?—resisted until the very instinct to love tends in time to become dulled and blighted.
I am willing to grant, indeed, that few women experience that obsessing longing of the man to grasp the woman of his desire, nor do they, as a rule, I think suffer the same terrible physical depression that causes incapacity for control. I am not certain here: women are less open about these matters than men are, and one hesitates to judge other women by oneself. We are dealing with a question very difficult to solve. We may find some explanation in the fact that many passionate women have had to learn how the energy of the sexual impulse may be diverted into other activities. It is a lesson that possibly men will have to learn. Yet I do not know, the price women have had to pay has been heavy and the results gained very poor. And does not this denial of love entail a waste of life?—that is what really matters. It is very hard to know the truth.
Here, then, is the question I would put to men who are suffering to-day from the unfaithfulness of women. I would ask them. Have they taken sufficient trouble to understand, both on the physical and psychical side, the sexual nature of woman, which is much more complex than their own? The art of love is not understood by men. If they paid more attention to this subject marriage would be freed from the strongest and most frequently operating cause that brings it to disaster. But this will never be done until we have ruled out from our moral conscience the idea of “the body as the prison of the soul.”
I have often asked myself if this misconception is not the real cause of all sex trouble?