§ 205
It is important, too, for every woman to keep clearly separated in her mind and in her action the two levels, egoistic-social and erotic. Only then is she in a satisfactory position to become a wife in a higher sense than that in which most women are wives, and her becoming a mother need interfere in no way with her remaining a wife to her husband.
It is therefore to the advantage of man to realize that, however much he may value his wife’s clear intuition in egoistic-social matters, he is to be sure about their utter exclusion from matters purely erotic. A man can never fall in love with a conventionally so-called unattractive woman solely because she has a good business head. If any man should think so, he would find, on closer analysis, that, if he was really in love, his motive was truly erotic. If he cannot find any really erotic factor in his attitude toward her, his union with her can never be a complete marriage.
He has confused the two levels. He cannot love her because she can manage a library or a bond broker’s office or an insurance agency, any more than he can love her really because she knows how to make fudge. He may be attracted by the fudge. He is undoubtedly attracted unconsciously by other factors truly erotic in her character. Otherwise he would be more prudent to marry the fudge rather than the girl.
Similarly if the woman thinks she attracts by her business or culinary ability she is confusing levels. There are some women who unfortunately, because erroneously, believe they have little or no erotic attraction. Plain in face, not well formed, possibly under-weight, complexions not clear, they think that by sedulously following egoistic-social trends they can make an appeal to other people and particularly to men. They fail to see that these trends have hardly anything to do with love, that, once they love, their form improves, that the homeliest face, once lighted by the fire of love, has a beauty all its own, pure and irresistible.
The same is true of unloving, unillumined, unfired men. Judging erroneously from a confusion of the two levels, they fail to see not only that erotic trends are the strongest and most universal in the world, but that being the fundamentally vital trends they are almost inexhaustible and provide the untapped energy which the egoistic-social thinking of these diffident men makes them fear to draw upon.
The mathematical exactness of the comparison of men on the egoistic-social level makes many a man think his erotic impulses are similarly inferior. He should ponder well upon the prodigality of nature, remembering that he, too, is part of nature.