your husband will meet will only be showing their most agreeable sides to him without the handicap of daily intercourse. Remember, also, that, though he may have the most honorable desire to be faithful to you in the letter and the spirit, he cannot by his own will suppress or increase his actual emotion toward you, and if you destroy his ideal of you it cannot be his fault if his ardor cools. That is one point of gigantic importance which I want to hammer into your head, child—whatever a person thinks and feels about you, you yourself are responsible for. You have given his or her sensibilities that impression, exactly as when you look in a mirror your reflection is reproduced.
People complain of being misunderstood, but it is because they themselves, unconsciously perhaps, have given the cause for misunderstanding. A girl may say a man is a brute and a false traitor, because in May he was passionately loving, making every vow to her, but by October he had cooled, and by December he had become in love with someone else! Granted that some men have fickle natures and more easily stray than others, still the actual emotion for a particular person is not under any human being’s control, only the demonstrations of it. I must be very explicit about this statement in case you misunderstand me.
I mean that no man or woman can love or unlove at will—(by “love” I am still meaning all the emotions which are contained in the state called “being in love”). This state in man or woman is produced, as I said before, by some attraction in the loved one, just as a needle is attracted by a magnet. If the magnetic power were to lessen in the magnet the needle could not prevent itself from falling away from it—or if another and stronger magnet were placed near the needle it would be drawn to that. It—the needle—would only be obeying natural laws and therefore would not be responsible.
Which, then, could you blame—the original magnet or the needle?
Obviously the magnet is responsible.
You may reply. But the magnet did not wish to lessen in attraction; that and the arrival of the stronger magnet were pure misfortunes and accidents of fate.
Granted—but this only brings in a third influence—it does not throw the blame upon the needle. So I want you to understand, Caroline, that if a man ceases to love you it is your own fault—or misfortune—never his fault; just as, if you cease to love the man, it is his fault or misfortune, not yours.
These are truths which ninety-nine women out of a hundred do not care to face. But the wise hundredth, realizing that she is the magnet, tries her uttermost to keep her magnetic power strong enough to withstand all misfortune or the attacks of other magnets—that is, if she wishes to keep the man who is the needle.