This implies neither that the rapport is solely a physical one nor that it is based on solely physical factors. Nor does it imply that a perfect marital love that has all the qualities of the romantic may not, by the proper behaviour on the husband’s part, be progressively developed as the years pass. Indeed, the fully matured love of at least a quarter of a century’s duration is the only marital love that has any claim to be called romantic. In the young, love is not romantic but may be spectacular, in its expression, or in the egoistic-social circumstances which surround it, but the only perfect love of a man and a woman is the one that has the growth of years.
If a man knowing the true technique which is more spiritual (more hypersomatic) than physical in every instance, though impossible without the complete combination of physical and spiritual, chooses any woman whatever of his own free will, and uses with her the real love technique of word and deed, he cannot fail to find in her his erotic complement, if she be really a woman.
The choice, it is admitted, is the work largely of his unconscious. The unconscious is an absolutely accurate registering apparatus; and as such is the real foundation of the choice of a mate.
But it should not for a moment be forgotten that the unconscious mechanisms that present this woman as more attractive than that to a man are only the foundation of the edifice of his marital love which it is his triumph to build with his own hands.
And it should equally well be remembered that the erotic control is his, and will remain his, if the marriage is to prove happy; also that the erotic control is more spiritual than physical, though it can never endure without the physical.
§ 209
The duty of marriage is the procreation of healthy children. The privilege and pleasure of marriage is what Havelock Ellis has called the play side of love.
If the husband does not secure and by a superior knowledge of love insist on securing in his wife this essential of human marriage, his marriage is only legal, only social, and has no love instinct back of it. It is not an erotic union. Erotic unions are the only healthy ones.
Erotic unions are the only healthy ones not merely in the sense of health-giving to the partners, but also in the sense of having themselves a healthy growth in progressively embracing all human activities, in which the partners are concerned in egoistic and social lines, embracing them in such a way that the love instinct increases its control over the ego instinct. This increase is the real object of a love marriage, not increase of wealth, honour, distinction, and experience of the world but increase of the dominance of love over self.