Woman fundamentally and biologically calls for man to be the stronger to impregnate by force the impregnable fortress of her femininity, and he who fails to do this fails to make a good husband. The training for husbandship, irrespective of wealth or social position, should start from this fundamental principle of masculine control of the marital situation. This control should begin at the altar, and never weaken, never relax for a moment, except at the times when the wife is by her erotic emotions at the climax of the love episode incapable of witnessing its relaxation, at least of envying her husband.
After a long courtship in which there has been much worship of the woman by the man, there may tend to be preserved, to hang over, a sort of worship habit in the husband; but this should give place to an inflexible attitude and a positive aggressive treatment, Petruchio-like, yet only in the erotic sphere, increasing in power as the years go by. Woman will test it hourly to detect any weakening, jealous of the strength to be handed down to her offspring. It is unconscious in her. She cannot help it.
In the modern woman with a vocation, to which there cannot be a possible objection if it does not exclude her proper maternity, the relation to her husband must still be one of emotional subservience. She cannot control him emotionally without making herself a mother-imago to him. He cannot, even unconsciously, accept this control of himself by her, without regressing to the condition of being dominated by the mother-imago, without being to her as her child and not her man.
Modern marriage must be an entirely new and different thing from most previous marital relations. Mastery over the woman must remain, if marriage is to continue; but it must be a spiritual mastery, a love mastery in place of the old Rome-inherited legal, economic and physical mastery. Thus the poor husband of a rich wife need lose no mastery, nor need the non-professional husband of a professional wife, nor the unintellectual husband of an intellectual wife, the uneducated husband of an educated wife.
Mastery or control does not consist any more in the regulation by the man of any egoistic-social activities of the woman, the dictating of what she shall do or wear or think, nor in the acts of the man himself consciously designed to steer her this way or that. Mastery does consist in what the husband, and the husband alone, can make the wife feel. It does consist in the establishment and maintenance of a sense on her part of belonging to him, which he can develop even though granting her in the egoistic-social sphere, the most absurd license—the Hörigkeit (mentioned by Freud) based on the peculiar intensity with which he gratified after awakening it in early married life, her erotic need.
§ 201
Possibly the great increase in the number of divorces is due to the increasing expectation of something unutterably fine in marriage and an inevitable disillusionment resulting from concrete experience. There would be no divorce on the grounds of adultery if the married woman felt that her paramour could give her no joy remotely resembling what her husband could. The adultery of the man, too, comes from disappointment. Where there is absolutely complete satisfaction the motive for adultery cannot exist.
The man or woman with conscious and unconscious passion of the one developed into a habit may be attracted by other women but the other woman’s attractiveness will not be as great as his wife’s. And deflection in either husband or wife, if they think at all precisely on their action, must be quite repugnant to them in every way. The uncontrolled man who does not master his wife’s erotic emotions is disappointed in her and seeks his supreme gratification with another woman who appears to be able to give him what he thinks he cannot get from his wife in the way of appreciation, sympathy or understanding.
If this is the man’s attitude then, of course, he cannot have grasped the idea of the higher monogamy, which is not that of getting but of giving. No man in any degree cognizant of the concept of true mating can fail to find even the woman to whom he happens to be married, able to receive if he practises properly the technique of presentation. He must have found certain qualities in her before he married her, which his awkwardness in presenting himself have perturbed, and he can now review these and work upon them until he is utterly accepted. For his presentation of himself and his service to her in the worship of Eros are the only means toward his adequately virile satisfaction. Credite expertis.
No one who has had prosperity in the egoistic-social sphere, who has had a comfortable home, for example, will choose adversity, will thereafter prefer to live in a tenement, noisy, squalid. No man who has experienced the greater profundities of virile control of the total erotic situation will choose to give any less of himself to his wife. No wife who has received from her husband the maximum that a man can give, which is himself—that is, his supreme control of himself and of her—will choose to look for anything greater or higher, for it does not exist even in the most extravagant imagination.