For these thirds there is no hope but to find each his or her own complementary personality. The women wait; for there is nothing else to do. They cannot find by looking; they can only give themselves the gaunt consolation of distracting their own attention from love until they are found by the proper men.
For in spite of the great popularity which George Bernard Shaw gives to his ideas by putting them in epigrammatic and striking literary form, the truth is manifest to all who think straightforwardly and do not believe in a statement simply because it is paradoxical and therefore emphatic—the truth, namely, that women are not the choosers but if there is any choice they are the chosen, and are themselves utterly helpless and must remain inactive.
They can try to attract men but the more they try, the more will the erotically developed men unconsciously and unerringly infer that there is some weakness about them that necessitates this strenuous attempt to compensate for it. The harder they try to attract men, the more suspicious do the men become, particularly those having any deep acumen. As for the men being simply the helpless puppets of a sex of sirens—it is ridiculous.
The world is made up of the unmarried, the truly mated and those ill-assorted thirds whom ignorance has left unhappy and helpless until knowledge comes to the male partner.
§ 157
Many of these third persons are the wives of ignorant husbands who have hallucinated the fusion which they have never made. The husband fancies, perhaps, that the fusion can be effected by the wife; that all he needs to do is to submit himself to the wife as dispenser of delights and that by merely having him she will glow and burn with the heat necessary to fuse their two souls and make them a whole instead of fragments. Delusion! Hallucination!
The child says to a stick, “This is a horse.” The child husband says to himself, “This is my wife,” whether he knows it to be a fact or not. And curiously enough the child knows he is only fancying; but the man, in thousands of instances, does not know it.
This unconscious, and therefore almost irresistible, tendency on the part of men to believe the existence of what they wish is the main obstacle to man’s control of the erotic situation. Based on biological necessity, which in the merely instinctive acts of animals secures the sexual reaction on the part of the female, the unconscious phantasy still persists in the human animal, the phantasy that the erotic acme of the man causes that of the woman every time. But it is a phantasy in the majority of civilized marriages and tragically enough it may be the only flaw in some where congeniality and affection are flawless.
The bridegroom has this definite task before him to know his wife, for he can never know her before marriage. His knowing is a process of perception, the failure to perceive being a form of anesthesia in himself. Adam knew his wife—the only good he brought out of Paradise and fully compensating for the loss of Paradise.
When he knows his bride he will know exactly how much resistance he has to overcome in order to develop her. She cannot tell him anything in words, for no woman can know. Not even the most experienced woman sexually can put into words exactly what unconscious resistance she may have to even a virgin-pure man.