§ 111
Much has been said not only in this book but in others about simultaneity of the erotic acme in husband and wife. Gallichan in his Psychology of Marriage (p. 107), speaking of women, says: “It should be known that the imperfect fulfillment of the marital act, unaccompanied by the normal, healthy gratification decreed by Nature with infinite care, has a more or less injurious effect upon the psychic-emotional being and may affect the bodily functions.... The husband who does not experience this emotion is either not the proper spouse for his partner, or some necessary element of reciprocal love is wanting or amiss. If there is any human act that should be perfectly mutual, it is this. When passion is shared alike, Nature approves and blesses the conjunction.”
From that it may be inferred that the author quoted advocates simultaneity of the erotic acme in husband and wife.
But there is a much better arrangement of the love episode than that. The husband should see to it that in every episode the wife not only arrives at the utmost climax of her erotic acme before he does but that she recovers sufficiently from her ecstasy to enable her to give thereafter conscious attention to his. Where, as in a passionate honeymoon, both partners lose consciousness, so to speak, together, in every love episode, neither has the supernal joy of witnessing the ecstatic culmination of the other’s bliss. With autoerotic proclivities, pardonable in the first weeks of marital life, they close their eyes to each other, at the climax, and they sink into their own subjective feelings, after which they come to the conclusion that each has loved the other to the limit.
But this is not the case. They have loved their own sensations to the limit but not each other’s. If it could be arranged that each should take turns in “taking care” of the other so that now one and now the other should first arrive at the climax, they would, it might appear to the superficial thinkers, each gain the priceless boon of seeing his or her own ecstasy reflected in the other’s.