The sheer blind, isolating selfishness of the average husband and the misery it causes him are the reason for my writing this book. If a man used one-tenth the intellect in his marital relations that he does in his corporation finance and in his inventions and scientific research, the latter would not be half as necessary as they seem to be, and he would himself be infinitely happier.
§ 3
Unless we are progressing toward a woman-made social order it is imperative that men carry on to a logical conclusion what they have begun.
“Charity begins at home” is one of the many maxims that were originated with a far different connotation from that which they have since acquired. Charity (Latin Caritas) originally meant “dearness” or “fondness” and once had an erotic flavour that it has since lost. The only place for sexual love is in marriage and its having escaped from this, like a captured thing, reflects not so much on itself as on the unnaturalness of its captivity. True erotism has practically fled from most marriages, leaving only an empty shell. Men should reflect that nothing is more necessary for the upbuilding of a real civilization than the personal lives of the individuals themselves. Penetratingly thoughtful men realize that the present state of civilization is diseased throughout, and that it “is not in our stars but in ourselves,” that we are to rely for advance.
§ 4
In this book an attempt is made to show how men can so control their marital situation as to make more and more unnecessary the tightness of the bond that operates to make many marriages so like an imprisonment for both husbands and wives. Also the suggestion is made that a certain type of action on the husband’s part will work in the direction of making both prostitution and divorce less and less necessary.
This type of behaviour, comparatively rare at the present time, is based on a pattern that will at once appeal to the sense of justice innate in every man. Although it implies a relaxation of much present constraint and artificiality in the married relation, it is in no sense antagonistic to true monogamous union but rather constitutes a much more advanced and progressive attitude toward the most vital question of the day.
The marriage of the near future, it is hoped, will be inspired by our latest scientific knowledge concerning the psychology of sex, including the ever present unconscious factor, which is the most potent factor in the marital situation and which has been necessarily ignored for the simple reason that, previous to a few years ago, everyone was ignorant of the unconscious mechanisms and their relation to each other, in making for mistakes and unhappiness in marital behaviour.
If every man would exercise the control over himself (the opposite of asceticism in the ordinarily accepted sense), the control which alone will secure that emotional ascendancy over his wife, necessary for happy marriage and unconsciously longed for by the wife, more than any other thing in marital life, he will reduce to the lowest possible frequency both divorce, which is the issue of so many marriages, and prostitution, which has for so many centuries been regarded as the bulwark of marriage and the protection of the wife.
As Grete Meisel-Hess says in her Sexual Crisis, “The happy marriage of the securely placed wife is founded upon the degradation and debasement of another woman, the prostitute”; and Havelock Ellis in the sixth volume of his Psychology of Sex (page 296) says that “the value of marriage as a moral agent is evidenced by the fact that all the better-class prostitutes in London are almost entirely supported by married men,” while “in Germany, as stated in the interesting series of reminiscences by a former prostitute, the majority of the men who visit prostitutes are married.” He then gives several reasons why this is the case.