All this she says in her actions, while her words may be: “Oh, Rob, you certainly are awkward. You don’t understand me a bit.”
How tragic if Rob should take her words as gospel truth and substantiate them by showing any irritation whatever!
§ 152
Possibly this is the place to say that if the young husband shows surprise or, worse, irritation at any of the, to him, seemingly bizarre acts of his new wife, he is providing her with exactly the reaction which her careful and thorough unconscious is looking for, finding which it says to itself: “Well, if I find many of these defects, farewell! I’ll attach myself to some other man.”
Whereas consciously she is triumphant in her power over him to make him anything from miserable to blissful.
This unconscious tendency to test the husband, based on the biological necessity of choosing a mate at least slightly stronger spiritually, psychically, mentally than herself, determines much of the actions of a maid with a man.
In married couples where the man is properly schooled in love, this wrangling on a low level does not take place except at its minimum at the outset. Frequently the woman immediately senses, unconsciously, that the man whose attentions she is receiving is of the stronger type necessary to compel her emotional submission.
This theory admits the possibility of perfect marriage between the lowest and highest types of intellect (which is an egoistic-social expression, not erotic) with proportionally happy results.
It also shows how every married couple can reinstate themselves in the most satisfactory mutual relation, even if they have already started on the wrong path.
If the husband realizes that he is only being tested, and by a sympathetic examiner who really wants him to pass the test, and that it requires only a little thinking on his own part to make him erotically a fully followed husband instead of a led one, he will certainly give the necessary time to visualizing the pattern his actions will have to take thereafter in order to make him successful.