§ 201
Possibly the great increase in the number of divorces is due to the increasing expectation of something unutterably fine in marriage and an inevitable disillusionment resulting from concrete experience. There would be no divorce on the grounds of adultery if the married woman felt that her paramour could give her no joy remotely resembling what her husband could. The adultery of the man, too, comes from disappointment. Where there is absolutely complete satisfaction the motive for adultery cannot exist.
The man or woman with conscious and unconscious passion of the one developed into a habit may be attracted by other women but the other woman’s attractiveness will not be as great as his wife’s. And deflection in either husband or wife, if they think at all precisely on their action, must be quite repugnant to them in every way. The uncontrolled man who does not master his wife’s erotic emotions is disappointed in her and seeks his supreme gratification with another woman who appears to be able to give him what he thinks he cannot get from his wife in the way of appreciation, sympathy or understanding.
If this is the man’s attitude then, of course, he cannot have grasped the idea of the higher monogamy, which is not that of getting but of giving. No man in any degree cognizant of the concept of true mating can fail to find even the woman to whom he happens to be married, able to receive if he practises properly the technique of presentation. He must have found certain qualities in her before he married her, which his awkwardness in presenting himself have perturbed, and he can now review these and work upon them until he is utterly accepted. For his presentation of himself and his service to her in the worship of Eros are the only means toward his adequately virile satisfaction. Credite expertis.
No one who has had prosperity in the egoistic-social sphere, who has had a comfortable home, for example, will choose adversity, will thereafter prefer to live in a tenement, noisy, squalid. No man who has experienced the greater profundities of virile control of the total erotic situation will choose to give any less of himself to his wife. No wife who has received from her husband the maximum that a man can give, which is himself—that is, his supreme control of himself and of her—will choose to look for anything greater or higher, for it does not exist even in the most extravagant imagination.