Let every jealous husband ponder this. If he cannot utterly satisfy his wife erotically, he is jealous of other men simply because consciously or unconsciously he thinks some other man can. Also if he cannot, his inability probably proceeds either from ignorance of the art of love or from a foolish disbelief in his physical powers, a most common delusion in the ordinary man who is brought up in the tradition that sex activity involves a loss of vitality, instead of constituting, as it does, an exercise of the interstitial glands, whose functioning is necessary to the most robust health and success, both of which are inimical to or destructive of the emotion of jealousy.
§ 184
One of the factors that make marriage a lottery for those who cannot or do not know about the unconscious element in the marital situation is the unconscious homosexuality characterizing so many men and women.
It is quite probable that the only impossible women, psychically, are those who have this unsuspected homosexual trend. It is an absolutely proven fact that the men who have it strongly developed are themselves impossible, unless they are cured of it.
The subject of homosexuality is one of the most serious, most complicated and most difficult ones of all the subjects connected with the marital question.
Let it not be understood that the homosexuals are all manifestly woman-hating men or man-hating women. Their homosexuality is not as evident as that. Sometimes its only visible sign is being what is called a man’s man or a woman’s woman.
The man who enjoys men’s company almost exclusively, the club man, the man who never misses an opportunity to meet men, who invariably rides in the smoker but who does not invariably smoke there, who is much more at ease with men than with women, is in all these reactions motivated not solely by the conscious motive of carrying on so-called male activities, but partly by an unconscious homosexual tendency which, though it may never express itself in overt acts, is still an influence dominating the majority of his actions, and, to that extent, is an influence working against his completely hologamous status. It is, in some if not all cases, undoubtedly the factor that is most powerful in preventing him from obtaining the erotic control over his wife necessary to a perfect hologamy.
Our man-made civilization has strongly homosexual tendencies, and has had them for centuries, expressed not only in men’s (and women’s) clubs, associations, fraternities and secret societies, but also in the compensatory woman-hunting and woman-worshipping done by some of the individual men, as a reaction from the unconsciously perceived homosexuality of their environment.
Psychoanalysis has shown, indeed, that some of the illicit sex relationships maintained by men are mostly for the purpose of demonstrating to the men themselves, bachelor club men, for example, that they are not really homosexually inclined.