The erotologists, however, have been quietly studying the marital situation for some decades. They have compared, weighed, correlated and investigated thousands of cases. Some of the sexologists have been unscientific and biased with ancient superstitions. A few erotologists, notably Havelock Ellis and Dr. Marie C. Stopes of England, Dr. W. F. Robie of Baldwinsville, Massachusetts, Dr. H. W. Long of Peoria, Illinois, and some of the psychoanalysts, are scientists, ready and willing to look at facts as they are and not as they might wish them to be.
The erotologists have actually discovered definite facts about the more intimate nature of the marital relation. It implies the interaction, in every married pair, of four sets of tendencies: the husband’s conscious and his unconscious trends and the wife’s conscious and unconscious trends. Anyone looking only at the conscious factors is naturally puzzled by almost all the external phenomena of marriage, e.g., why they fell in love, what either could see in the other, why another pair fell out, what on earth was the matter with them.
§ 66
To the observer not looking beneath the surface with the scientific instrument of precision constituted by the study of the unconscious, the actions of two married people are as unaccountable as those of a tack sliding uphill on a piece of smooth paper. The erotologists have looked underneath and seen the magnet in the hand of another person and are not surprised.
To the erotologists marriage is in no sense a lottery, but a situation in which the causal factors are just as clearly natural as they are either in a twelve-cylinder automobile that runs smoothly or in one that snorts along with a couple of cylinders working. Anyhow a lottery is only a matter of chance; and chance is only cause to which we either have blinded ourselves or have not yet become sentient.
The erotologist can tell us definitely that in marriage the erotic situation should be controlled by the husband, as the husband is in every case the cause of the good or evil outcome of the match. Masculinity is the unquenchable yearning to control the woman emotionally, erotically. Femininity is the insatiable desire to be erotically controlled.
Everyone will admit that for a man to be erotically controlled by a woman does not represent the peak of masculine attainment and that a woman’s desire to control a man is, while common enough, not an expression of her love instinct but of her ego instinct by which women are just as much motivated as are men.
The erotologist tells us (the main thesis of this book) that the sole solid bond of union in marriage is just this erotic control of the wife by the husband. It is not complete and perfect if it does not, in all activities strictly marital, supersede all egoistic trends. A woman may as mother of her children, as lady of the house, as woman of business, display in those spheres as many expressions of egoistic-social instinct as she has opportunity for or as circumstances allow; but as wife she is due only to constitute the controlled member of the complementary fusion of the marital pair.
It is not without deep significance that the Anglo-Saxon word from which “wife” is derived is allied to the root WIB which means “to tremble.” It expresses an essential psychological truth. If the feminine element in the binary, as I have called the perfect marital union, is somewhat analogous to the surging sea on whose rocks or sand beaches it continues to break, we see in the rocks or the strand the solid, at least comparatively unwavering thing to which the surges conform themselves. There need only be a comparative steadiness on the part of the masculine element. He may tremble, too, but if only he tremble less than she, he will be the masculine and she the feminine element.