§ 148
This hastiness marks the love episode on the part of the average man. What he wants is a reaction that is to take place in himself, for which his bride is merely the external complementary mechanism. The purely mechanical side of this he could either purchase from a courtesan or seize against her will from an innocent “honest” girl, but he fears venereal disease in the former and trouble of accidental paternity or discovery or both in the case of the latter. Eventually he regards both types of women with equal impersonality. Either is merely food for his sexual (not erotic in the highest sense) hunger, and it is his own sex hunger that he is bent on appeasing, with absolutely no idea of the difference in erotic value between the two types of women, in the way he acts. There is none, for neither is more appropriate to his spiritual need than hay would be for his stomach.
The man who desires a wife either for the purely sexual or for the purely domestic motive has no conception of marriage whatever. If he is influenced either consciously, or unconsciously by such a motive he might as far as his own sole advantage is concerned, confine himself to sexual affairs with prostitutes. He is unaware of the new light that has been thrown on love by the recently acquired knowledge of the work of the ductless glands. He has never heard of them, of course, and could not be expected to know how intimately they are connected with each other and with his entire mental and physical welfare.
What he later finds out, and that with no help whatever from science, but from tough experience, is that the two things that he craves—namely, sexual satisfaction and all the good things of domestic life—are in some way inevitably and more and more sundered. His wife either is and remains “cold” or acquires suddenly or gradually a coolness which increases to actual pseudo-frigidity. He notices a change in her. He knows he has not himself changed.
The change should have been in him and then there would have been in her a change which would have gratified him instead of disappointing him. But, never having been taught how to behave in the most intimate relations of marriage, he is feeling the results of his ignorance just as would a landlubber feel eventually the resulting shipwreck if he undertook, or were forced against his will, to pilot a big ship. The husband should be the matrimonial pilot, but he has received no course of instruction in that form of navigation.