§ 171
Unconsciously, of course, such people know from the first that they should get from each other the sweetness par excellence of human life, but while they know this unconsciously and it makes some of them uncomfortable and eccentric, even unhuman, they fancy so many inhibitions and barriers to it (particularly in the case of narrowly brought up women) that they do not gain from marriage that unspeakable and indescribable sense of identity each with the other that would successfully obviate any tendency whatever to infidelity.
This feeling of identity is not only thus physical in the husband and wife at the climax of erotism, but is given tangible, visible, and in all ways perceptible, manifestation in their children. It is given ideal existence in the community of interests it engenders in connection with the family life, interests which are here the expression of the ego-instinct, but here, as they should be, interests arising from the subordination of the ego-instinct to the now brightly revealed love instincts, which are not accessible to consciousness until after enlightenment in the technique of the love drama.
Those people also are unable to give fullest expression to themselves in the love episode who consciously or unconsciously, frankly or otherwise, place the egoistic-social motive above the love motive, who marry “for a meal ticket” or for any other egoistic-social motive such as wealth or position.
Both of these may be taught, if they can be made to see their false positions. Those who overweight the physical motive can, unless their intelligence is of too low an order, be made to see eventually, that they are contenting themselves, or trying to make themselves content, with much less happiness than they are capable of. Those who overemphasize the egoistic-social end of their relation to their spouses, can be instructed in love, so that they can raise their union to the higher order, unless, of course, there is the comparatively rare absolute incompatibility of temperament.
Marriage need not in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred be dissolved. Within reasonable limits; that is, excluding the widest possible divergence of taste and interests, almost any man can learn to control the erotism of almost any woman, if he wishes to take the trouble to learn how to do it.