In every sphere of life the mother[23] is always a relaxed woman to her son, particularly in his childhood, but is never a relaxed woman to her husband, except at her consummation in the erotic episode.
If the husband is unwilling, or unprepared to accept these conditions of marriage, he is marrying a woman to be a mother to him, instead of a wife, and he is completely deluding both himself and her. If he is unwilling or unprepared to accept these conditions of marriage, he needs to wait till he is willing or he needs to be prepared.
This may sound, to some men, like giving entirely and not getting anything in return. But they must realize that getting the response they biologically need themselves, and consciously desire, if they be above the animal level, is a process of constructive giving.
So much of their attention husbands must give in order to get what few really get—the total response in every fibre of their wives’ life-love. They cannot get anything by merely taking. Things merely taken turn to dust in their hands. What they want to get must be lured forth from the unconscious depths of their wives and must, to the wife, seem uncaused, spontaneous, no matter how much the husband knows he has practised art.
§ 111
Much has been said not only in this book but in others about simultaneity of the erotic acme in husband and wife. Gallichan in his Psychology of Marriage (p. 107), speaking of women, says: “It should be known that the imperfect fulfillment of the marital act, unaccompanied by the normal, healthy gratification decreed by Nature with infinite care, has a more or less injurious effect upon the psychic-emotional being and may affect the bodily functions.... The husband who does not experience this emotion is either not the proper spouse for his partner, or some necessary element of reciprocal love is wanting or amiss. If there is any human act that should be perfectly mutual, it is this. When passion is shared alike, Nature approves and blesses the conjunction.”
From that it may be inferred that the author quoted advocates simultaneity of the erotic acme in husband and wife.
But there is a much better arrangement of the love episode than that. The husband should see to it that in every episode the wife not only arrives at the utmost climax of her erotic acme before he does but that she recovers sufficiently from her ecstasy to enable her to give thereafter conscious attention to his. Where, as in a passionate honeymoon, both partners lose consciousness, so to speak, together, in every love episode, neither has the supernal joy of witnessing the ecstatic culmination of the other’s bliss. With autoerotic proclivities, pardonable in the first weeks of marital life, they close their eyes to each other, at the climax, and they sink into their own subjective feelings, after which they come to the conclusion that each has loved the other to the limit.
But this is not the case. They have loved their own sensations to the limit but not each other’s. If it could be arranged that each should take turns in “taking care” of the other so that now one and now the other should first arrive at the climax, they would, it might appear to the superficial thinkers, each gain the priceless boon of seeing his or her own ecstasy reflected in the other’s.