The concept of romantic love, like that of love at first sight, contains the implication that love and especially married love depends more upon what Fate or Destiny vouchsafes to the man than upon what he takes from Fate or creates for himself. The taking and creating is certainly the prerogative of the man while yet it may not necessarily belong to the woman.
§ 16
That is the essential difference between the masculine and the feminine nature. It is masculine to give and to create and to change external reality. It is feminine to receive, and to respond to the activity of the male. It is feminine to be thrilled at the effects produced upon the wife by her husband’s activities in every sphere of action. It is masculine to be thrilled only by the resultant ecstasies of the wife. It is not masculine to be emotionally impressed except by the results of his own individual and particular actions: results effected in other persons and things.
This is the essential masculinity and femininity assumed in this book. It will be evident to those acquainted with modern psychology that the reverse of these conditions implies the interchange of masculine and feminine psychic natures.
For example the man who should (and yet not a few do) derive his satisfactions solely from the emotions aroused in him by the actions of other persons and things is not truly masculine. His love could not in any real sense be called virile.
§ 17
Virile love is the only love that a man should have—the only feeling a real man can have—for a woman. Indeed, it is the only way a man loves a woman if he is truly to be said to love her. Any so-called love depending on being charmed by a woman is essentially effeminate, not virile. The moment he surrenders to her charm, he is not a man but an autoerotic[7] child. He should absolutely and positively charm her. There is no disgrace, no lack of true femininity in a woman’s yielding to the power a man must exercise over her erotic instincts. The power is strictly a one-way power, exerted by the man upon the woman if, and only as long as, he remains man and she remains woman. The bisexual nature of both man and woman often permits a couple to reverse this direction of power influence.[8]
If the wife’s charm is the only binding factor in a marriage the marriage is doomed to dissolve actually or potentially. And in order to maintain this merely superficial charm, which no real man needs to feel in a woman, she is obliged to resort to all varieties of artifice from the lip stick and the exotic perfume upward to the forced attempt to be intellectually frank and interesting. Woman as woman has no need for this artifice to maintain charm for primordial man.
It may be that man at the present day is not primordial superficially. But fundamentally he is and so is woman primordial woman, and for all the civilization which is only conscious, the ninety per cent more or less of unconscious action and being in the man acts upon and is inevitably and automatically reacted to by the woman; and any survey of the totality of the relations between them is incomplete if it does not recognize and control the almost unlimited energy of the primordial man and woman beneath the surface. The difficulty is that this recognition is a task; and most married couples attempt to hide it both from themselves and from each other. In such actions of the woman as are dominated, as most conscious acts are, by the egoistic-social[9] impulse, any artifice, great or small, as the case may be, is inevitably registered, to the woman’s detriment, in the unconscious records of the man.
“Does she,” the unconscious says, “really need these embellishments, or does she only think she needs them? If she really needs them, I have reels of mental moving pictures of women who do not. If she only thinks so, what have I failed to do that should inspire her confidence, or prevent her from unconsciously trying to attract the autoerotic glances of other men? I must adjust her up to a greater height of erotic exaltation. Possibly that is the fundamental reason. If she were actually my erotic counterpart the idea would not even unconsciously enter her mind to improve herself in this showy manner. I must remove this tendency from her.”