§ 174
If it should seem to some that the potentialities of the marriage that has been called a lottery are usually those of misery, and that the ordinary marriage only brings out the miseries of existence to which some shut their eyes, and from which others run away, it need only be suggested that almost nothing runs itself in the world as we know it, but everything needs constant upkeep, and it would be unreasonable to expect that when the nuptial knot is tied all activities in the direction of keeping it tied could be given up.
If the world about us is in constant change, to which we are obliged to make constantly changing adaptation, it is even more strikingly a fact that the world within us is constantly changing; and that we need to control this change ourselves and could not, if we tried, find a more fascinating occupation than learning how to make our inner adaptations in the best manner.
Marriages that run down before death has ended them are those where the man has lost his psychic potence, due to initial or gradually developing anesthesia on his part.
In the courtship he has taken a man’s part, presumably; but has stopped his wooing after marriage, because he has confused egoistic-social impulses with erotic. He has thought marriage was a civil contract by which he came into possession of something. Love scorns contracts; as it evaporates in barter. Most unhappy marriages are of the “run-down” type. The thesis of this book is that the only distinctive man’s work in the world is to keep winding them up. The man that lets his marriage run down is probably a perpetual-motion crank at heart. He thinks that in marriage he has found a thing that will run by itself forever.