Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

Moreover, every human being, child, adult, savage or sage knows the fatal consequences of complete and exhaustive exploration: how it cloys, how it surfeits, how it nauseates! The very constitution of man as a sentient being necessitates such consequences. The repetition of a stimulus reduces the force of its appeal owing to the very tendency to habituation to which all of us as adaptable creatures are prone. We react eagerly and quickly at first; the thousandth time we hardly lift an eyelid.

Now, in the face of all these facts of common and everyday experience, it would seem both absurd and indefensible to claim that any two people, whether of the same or of different sexes, could hope to spend many years together—not to mention a lifetime—without ultimately falling the prey to indifference, if not dislike; and where the circumstances of their first coming together have been attended by any excessive warmth of feeling, the ultimate revulsion of that feeling, by constituting at once a disillusionment and, among unwise people, a surprise, must lead to an indifference proportionately more acute.

Unlike the mere association of friends, in which two people may work together, share the same interests, enjoy the same games, or suffer the same hardships, pleasures and difficulties, the married couple are united chiefly by a physical bond which has its basis in an act of passion, an act of desire, an act of power.

But passion is largely a matter of surplus strength, violent stimulation and the lust of possession, all of which are steadily worn down by (a) a steady drain on surplus strength, (b) the supervention of gradual callousness through the repetition of similar stimuli, and (c) the consciousness of holding definitely, or rather indefinitely, the object originally coveted.

Desire also, by being gratified, is stilled. The best cure, in fact, for desire is precisely gratification. But a cure is hardly what is anticipated by the usual love-match.[55]

With regard to the act of power, which, despite civilization, still accounts for more than half the savour of the sexual relationship, that is surely seriously impaired by the law itself which enjoins cohabitation as a duty upon the parties to a marriage contract.

Thus the indefinite continuance of the emotion which first led a couple to unite, and the protraction sine die of the delights of the early consummation of their desire, are bound, as it were, with mathematical certainty to become impossible. But this makes the relationship exceedingly difficult, and one which, far from constituting a promise of happiness, is very much more likely to develop into an absolute guarantee of incessant and most tiresome differences.

To reply to these objections that there is a “love” that transcends all these difficulties, may sound pleasant and charming and good-natured, but it is hardly candid. For as I have pointed out above, the possibility of the existence of this rare kind of love does not justify us in making marriage a lie for the bulk of mankind.

(B) Furthermore, monogamic marriage makes no allowance for the fact that human courtship and the subsequent union of the sexes to which it leads, partakes essentially of the nature of an adventure. In fact, to a large number of people in these dull and ordered days it is the only adventure of their lives. In many of its aspects it is reminiscent of the qualities of the chase, and it would be unscientific not to allow for this smack of venery in the preliminaries which precede venery. That mutual attraction which ultimately leads to mutual capitulation is full of the excitement, the doubt, the anxiety and the final triumph of the huntsman. When the quarry is a positive virgin and her pursuer a positive man, even the fascination of fear is added—fear of the intensity of the passion awakened—to complete the similitude of the experience to the circumstances of the chase.

Beside this, however, the steady hum-drum routine of married life can at best only be a flat parody—particularly married life in modern civilization, witnessed, as it is, by innumerable stuffy relatives, marred by imperfect health, supported by tired and irascible nerves, and depressed by the consciousness that it must last a lifetime.