Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

But where is the freshness, where, therefore, the joy of companionship with some one whose mind one has thoroughly explored, whose every word, comment, or exclamation one anticipates five or six seconds ahead? Where is the exquisite quality of the companion in one whom one knows as well as oneself, whom one has had endless days, weeks, months and years to study, to listen to and to understand? The most gifted brain can be circumnavigated if it be lived with daily. The richest storehouse of spirituality can hardly hold out against daily depredation.

Companionship, however, offers something else that is priceless in the mortal monotony of our lives. It draws us away from excessive communion with ourselves, from the surfeit of self. Thus the friend comes as a welcome disturber of the interminable meditation that proceeds at all hours of the day between a man and himself.

But the mate who is always with you is so much a part of yourself, so intimately known to you, that nothing she can say is sufficiently arresting to disturb any meditation; and unless she actually overturns the lamp, or accidentally chops one of her fingers off, or falls downstairs, she is hardly noticed.

And what is true of the husband here is equally true of the wife. She gets to know her husband’s every word, every mood, every gesture by heart. To call his presence companionship, or the boon that comes with friendship, would be to cast a slur on all companionship and friendship for ever.

Companionship between husband and wife is therefore impossible. It is impossible because the very source of the chief quality of companionship—refreshment—is cut off at the root by too much association, too much and too incessant exploration of each other’s minds, by the two spouses.

(F) The monogamic marriage is as a rule more satisfying to the female than to the male; but only, as we shall see in the chapter on Divorce, if children are born regularly, and the circumstances of their birth and their infancy run a normal course. The reason of this is that since the positive healthy woman finds her complete sexual experience only by means of the coitus, plus the period of gestation, plus parturition, and plus the months of lactation, she finds, as a rule, in the course of a married life in which she brings forth children regularly and in normal circumstances, all that her body can possibly expect from an adapted sexual life.[56] The act of fertilization, which, as we have already seen in a former chapter, is only the sparking-plug that starts the huge cycle that culminates in the weaning, is such a trifling incident in her sexual experience that very soon her husband begins to assume in her eyes the importance which, as a matter of fact, he enjoys relative to the huge cycle itself. And if she happens no longer to feel that enthusiasm for him which she felt as a fiancée, she can endure the disillusionment with equanimity and sweetness because she is now aware that, after all said and done, he does not really matter to her nearly as much as she once rather foolishly imagined. Promoting and expediting the drop in a woman’s affection for her husband must also be reckoned not only the natural surfeit and indifference that comes with excessive familiarity, but also the presence of the children themselves. For while they act as a consolation to the woman for the declining affection of the pair, they also operate as a powerful reducer of that affection in herself. The unconscious longing for fertilization that has long been drawing her to her husband and forcing her to transfigure his very common and ordinary personality into something exceptional, naturally abates as fast as children are born, because, as an unconscious longing, it gets gratified and therefore stifled. And thus children, far from being the alleged bonds uniting couples, may become the most potent wedges driving them asunder. The extraordinary number of loving childless couples in which the woman’s devotion remains unabated may be accounted for in this way.[57] Policy, as a rule, bids her treat him with consideration and the outward signs of devotion as the breadwinner, as the father of her children, and as a person who, since he is destined to be her constant companion, it is merely ordinary good sense to humour and to please; but provided that she have children from him at regular intervals, she is not much troubled by the pronounced drop in her affection and regard for him.

To the man, on the other hand, to whom, as we have seen, the sparking-plug incident constitutes a complete sexual experience, and whose sexual life therefore begins and ends with this spasmodic desire for woman and the brief relation with her to which it leads, this falling off in affection and desire is a matter of very grave concern, because he has no bodily consolation. He may love his children, he may delight in their company, and he may be wholly interested in his home; but the bearing and nursing of his children constitutes no bodily experience to him; and in life it is the demands of the body that are most important and most importunate when they are not obeyed.

For his body to enjoy its necessary, satisfactory experience, slight and brief as it is, it is essential that some desire, some passion, in fact some of the feeling he felt for his wife as a fiancée, should remain. It is necessary that he should still look upon the act as one of passion, desire and power. But as we have seen, the act has been deprived of most of its passion, desire and power by the inevitable consequences of the State monogamic marriage. Its beauties have literally been worn away. It has lost its savour and its strength by having been systematized, time-tabled, protected, ordered, and above all, repeated too often, without that “certain modicum of variety” which is the essential element in all life.

Generally speaking, then, it may be argued with justice that, where conditions are normal and children are born regularly, monogamic marriage can be tolerated quite well by women, but not by men. For when once the elements constituting the joy of cohabitation have been robbed from the man’s share—as in nine hundred and ninety-nine marriages out of a thousand they must—the relationship, though still endurable to the positive healthy female, to whom the act of fertilization, and raison de plus her husband, is of such minor importance, becomes intolerable to the healthy positive male; and unless he is prepared to face a life in which every week is a long-drawn-out torture to his body, he cannot remain faithful to his spouse.

In its general attitude towards and understanding of monogamic marriage, therefore, this Age, in addition to smuggling the lie of happiness into the contract, also completely distorts the true relation to the union of the woman on the one hand, and the man on the other. By a false and entirely gratuitous analogy, it supposes that the man’s position can be and is as tolerable as that of the child-bearing female.