§ 202
In the marriage of the future we must make sure that the art of love is thoroughly learned by the husband. Without it, he has only a small chance of making a successful marriage. And we must see to it that this new art of love be not like Ovid’s the adulterer’s art of winning a woman away from her home, but the husband’s art of retaining her in it.
This will require a readjustment, possibly of the concept of “home.” The home meant here is not in any sense the material house and furniture and embellishments. The home is the family, to which all the members should belong in a sense far more spiritual than the average. The truly mated couple belong to the family forever and to the children, until the latter marry and make families of their own. Any deflection from the purely hologamous ideal on the part of either the husband-father or wife-mother is a misfortune to the latter, but unequivocally the fault of the former.
The marriage of the future, if it is to follow the single-standard pattern of equal joy for equal mutuality, will be in no way inferior to any type of so-called romantic marriage of today. It will have all the totality of fusion of the individual’s body and soul, all the fusion of the personalities of the two mates. It will have all the finality and indissolubility now wished for it by the present generation whose marital relations begin to crumble in a year or less. It will never degenerate into a situation where life seems not worth living, but will be the only circumstance in which life is consciously and perennially known, as well as believed and felt, to be thoroughly worth while.
By their confusion of the two levels of control women lose much of the happiness that would come to them from the direct control exercised over them by men, on the erotic level. Into the love episode egoistic-social impulses, being the uninvited guest at a feast, only intrude. Women’s sphere of active control is limited, on all rational grounds, to the work in the world which they choose for themselves apart from being wives.
It is equally true, too, that if the erotic life is to be rationally developed in both partners the husband will have to keep carefully separated the egoistic-social in his life from the erotic. There is much talk about the ability of a woman to be a mother, which tacitly implies being a housewife, and at the same time to be a professional woman or to do anything whatever of an egoistic-social nature outside of her home.
The idea never seems to have occurred to anybody that in an equitable marriage at least, not to mention an ideal one, the husband has any part to play in the construction of that spiritual situation which should constitute the home. The father really has as vital a part to play in the home as the mother. There is no perfect home that does not contain these two absolutely equally unifying factors. “What is home without a father?” is quite as pertinent a question as the other trite one.
This does not for a moment imply that the duties of the father and the mother in the material home should be the same. This would give only a literal verbal significance to the statement that a man’s duty is quite as much toward his home as is a woman’s. If we were simply using words that sounded reasonable we might as well repeat the oft expressed and seemingly perfectly balanced retort of woman to her husband: “If I have to bear the child, why on earth shouldn’t you care for it?”