And a man who not only defers to his wife’s judgment in egoistic-social lines but in addition continues to “compass her with sweet observances,” being always chivalrously polite and attentive to her, if he fail to control her erotically, will completely dissatisfy her. His attentiveness will actually annoy her. She unconsciously realizes that he is playing the obedient little boy to her, and thus making out of her a mother and not a wife.
The masochism referred to is an exaggeration. The natural desire of the woman for erotic subjection is not masochism in the ordinarily accepted sense, which means the pleasure experienced by some neurotics as a result of pain inflicted upon them by others.
What Ellis’ correspondent means is that giving a woman her way in great things and compelling her obedience in small things equally show that love confidence without which any man’s actions will continuously gall the wife’s unconscious. If he yields to her in great egoistic-social issues, he shows the same confidence in the superiority of the erotic instincts (the love confidence par excellence) that he shows in compelling her obedience in small things.
§ 109
No egoistic-social experience, save when all the circumstances are such as produce truly marital conditions, ever has the same transcendent value as when the erotic within the married state is raised to the nth power. Not does any of life’s rewards in the egoistic-social sphere compensate for the loss of the erotic consummations of the binary life.
The married pair can be too sexual in the strictly physical sense, they can leave undeveloped the more complicated organism of psychic erotism—but they cannot be too erotic in the sense in which I have used this term, for erotism, in the sense I use it, is psychically controlled sex, controlled not as in the majority of cases, by repression and inhibition, but by rational modes of expression.
§ 110
Modern science shows, and clearly, why it must be so, that man’s emotional tensions are never to be relaxed in the presence of a woman herself tense.
This applies in every other situation in life, as well as in the distinctively erotic. A man’s emotional tensions are not to be relaxed on a woman, but on a relaxed woman.