§ 134
The question—Are not all healthy men prone to relax their erotic tensions more rapidly than women?—may be answered. Possibly they are, but they need not be. If a man is sick he is more likely to feel like crying, yet he does not always do so. If a man receives any great blow, he is proportionately more likely to regress to the stage of infantility.
Healthy men, on the contrary, need not be short-winded in the love episode any more than in playing a baseball game, painting a picture, singing a song or writing a book. It may be that no art can be taught. Even if this is true, we shall always attempt to teach arts of all kinds. It may be that the art of love requires a certain amount of innate taste in a man, for him to make any great progress.
History has shown a few great geniuses and a few great lovers. Few great lovers figure in history because the average human adult married lover has no penchant for advertising himself. The average childish married man can, however, learn to take steps in the direction of adulthood in married relations, even if he never becomes truly great as a lover.
This is indeed the most important point of all. Divorces in large numbers and unhappy marriages in still larger numbers occur simply because the husband will not have, or has not had the opportunity to learn the main lessons of the married life, the greatest of which is that it is his privilege to insure his wife’s attainment of the erotic acme, preferably before his own, but at least simultaneously, and every time his own occurs.
They are not truly mated unless this plan of simultaneity or succession is followed whole-heartedly. If it is not now followed, it must be begun at once, and the only method is through the appropriate action of the husband.
A baby takes its mother’s milk and gives nothing in return except smiles and gurgles and sleep. A man taking his wife’s body and giving her no adult emotional return for the emotional catharsis he gets himself, except the infantile smile and sleep, is himself no less a baby.
And she will “mother” or “baby” him, first, and unconsciously hate him later. Asking him if he has his rubbers, his umbrella, his overcoat and the thousand and one things that more or less consciously irritate him, show (but, in the average man, only to his unconscious) that what really irritates him in these minor solicitudes is his manifestly infantile situation.