Men would make happy marriage certain if they should universally grasp this idea; namely, that their letting themselves go entirely without the prior or simultaneous erotic acme on the part of their wives, is putting themselves on the same level as the animals without, however, being in the animal environment.
To that level the wives cannot sink; yet the husbands allow themselves to do so almost without exception. Because of centuries of repression their wives are not able to respond to the erotic situation as rapidly as they do themselves, and yet the husbands act as if they responded fully. This type of behaviour is practically equivalent to producing a hallucination in themselves.
To use a term from pathological psychology, every husband who does not secure his wife’s erotic acme before or with his own, actually hallucinates, for his own benefit, that reaction on her part. He is exactly like a man walking along a level sidewalk and making as if to step upstairs each step he takes and thinking he is climbing—in so far, just crazy, that is all.
It would be much better in some ways for a husband of this type to renounce love episodes forever, for such actions form no part of a real one; they are as productive as half a pair of scissors without the other half.
This solitary vice in a husband (masturbatio per vaginam) always comes from his hallucinating the effects he should produce instead of producing them. He is alone with his wife in his sexual (not love) episodes because she is practically not there. He may never have thought of the question as to where she may have been. She may have been mentally in the arms of another man. “With another person and yet alone!” is a terrible thought.
Yet when we think about what we see and hear among so-called humans we must realize how much alone all except the very fewest are, alone because they have not yet discovered the only method of not being alone—the supernal communion of one man and one woman. The few men who have learned how to love, and the exactly equal number of women whom they have taught, are the only persons in the world who are not absolutely and completely as alone as would be a solitary chemical atom in an illimitable universe of space.
§ 156
All the crowds and jams of people we see are merely, for the most part, huddling together, as an unconscious compensation for the sickening loneliness they feel in their heart of hearts. We see them in amusement parks, and in all places where hordes of people congregate; and undoubtedly a part of the impulse which moves them is their unconscious solitude for which they get only consciously perceptible consolation in the sight of each other and rubbing of elbows and treading on each other’s feet.
If one should ask if sex is the sole or major motive in all this the answer would be, by no means, if physical sex is all that is meant. The need is for companionship which many followers of crowds, not having the companionship furnished by the complete love of a man or a woman, fancy they get from the sight or elbow-touch of masses of people.
The deeply, profoundly, thoroughly married couples are the only ones who have no need to fear anything that comes from incompleteness. They neither crave nor are averse to other people, but the most fully mated never appreciate crowds very highly. Into their own mystic circle of binary personality they cannot take a third.