To describe all the possible complications that will ultimately lead a negative couple into the Divorce Court, or cause them to seek a judicial separation, or induce them to conclude that they would be happier living apart, is therefore beyond the powers of any human being. The negative man and woman, like the invalid or the eccentric, must remain an enigma, because natural laws and forces no longer operate normally or calculably in them.
Nevertheless, it is possible, in a rough way, to outline certain features which are more or less common even to sub-normal people, and from which, therefore, certain general rules of conduct may be inferred.
For instance, we may say of negative men and women that:—
(a) The physiological promptings of an instinctive and organic kind are never likely (as with their healthier brethren) to weigh very heavily with them. (The ethereal lovers who believe that marriage is a union of souls.)
(b) The sentimental and intellectual aspects of a sexual situation are more likely to determine their conduct than its vital or reproductive aspects. (The lovers in most modern novels, in which “Luvv” is supposed never to have bodily union as its aim, but only companionship, or sweet words, or pure affection, or a life of “unselfish” mutual service, or some other high-falutin’ nonsense.)
(c) The force of passion being no longer the ruling determinant in them, such factors as vanity, caution, cowardice, and even indolence, may dominate the sex impulses and direct conduct to their own ends. (The bulk of hasty marriages made during the war were of this nature, vanity both in the man and the woman giving rise in each individual to such elated feelings that these were mistaken for depth of passion.)
(d) The intellectual attitude towards love, and the passions which it tends to assume, may cause negative people to imitate without feeling the behaviour of their more passionate fellows and their love affairs, thus producing a false but fairly accurate image of true passion. (The actors in modern society, all of which are by no means professional histrions.)
Dealing with (a) first, it must be fairly obvious that where physiological promptings are feeble, deep bodily disappointments, and particularly rebuffs to the reproductive system of the women, can be tolerated very much more placidly than where physiological promptings are imperious.
Thus all negative women are likely to endure for a very much longer period a childless marriage, or a marriage in which child-birth has ceased in the first four to six years, than are their positive sisters. In all “happy” marriages of this kind, therefore, which have only terminated with the demise of one of the parties, negativeness may certainly be suspected in the woman, and, since like tends to attract like, also in the man.
When, therefore, unhappiness supervenes in such a home, other causes must be sought than the secret and unconscious revolt of the woman’s reproductive equipment, or the man’s fiery need for sexual variety.