According to her bringing up she may repress all or a part, or none, of her natural resentment at this situation; and the resentment is going eventually to make her more exacting of her husband, if she is to surrender to him even her impersonal body. For impersonal her body does become even to her. She regards it as belonging by law to him and she will not virtually inhabit it when he is with it. At his approach she flees from it every time. And as this flight is an unconscious, though a real flight, we cannot blame her if her husband will not, or cannot, take enough care of it and its reactions to enable her to assimilate the necessary food of love.
She will think: “He says he loves me, but I know only that he likes my body. I begin to hate it because it does not give me the satisfaction it does him. I can’t understand it a bit. It’s a strange world. But I suppose it’s got to be as it is. I can’t do anything about it.”
And she cannot, if he will not or cannot. Is there any more powerful deterrent than despair to prevent a young wife from being able to produce in herself a relaxation of erotic tensions? Her usual course, when she begins to despair thus is to deny to herself that she has any sex feeling at all. Her husband then agrees with her and calls her frigid. This crystallization of her feelings not merely retards but annihilates whatever abilities she has to express her love in an erotic way. She fortifies herself with the compensating thought that sex is, as she has always heard, sinful, filthy, nauseating. Her face begins to become hardened, to develop a wrinkle or two and she is in a fair way to become an anti-something.
She begins to realize that he has not done this or that, such as remembering to post a letter or make a purchase or keep an appointment with her; or he has contradicted or opposed her in some judgment concerning practical every-day occurrence. He has not done what he should have done, to be sure; but not only does she not know what that thing is but she has no means of knowing what it is. She therefore is forced to express her dissatisfaction with him in terms of a sphere of impulse with which she is acquainted; namely, the egoistic-social. She cannot talk to him in a language of which she knows not a single word.
The relations between a new bride and her husband in their first love episode are those of an examination or test. The bride tests the groom, of course, in the majority of cases unconsciously. There is nothing else for her to do. There is no test she has to meet. By the circumstances of the case she is not required to do anything for the conscious performance of which she is to be judged or tested by anyone. She has not to do but merely to be, to exist—as if, asleep, to be awakened.
The unconscious situation is quite the reverse. The husband is the one who is tested. If he fails in any detail of this test there remains in the story of his actions a lacuna which she has no means of filling, but which forms the nucleus of a doubt in her unconscious mind and the centre toward which all subsequent failures on his part tend to congregate in such numbers that she may become later completely skeptical. She will say she knows he loves her. To be sure, he does a thousand little things for her all of egoistic-social, none of truly erotic value.
If he even once takes these virtually friendly, unconscious examinings of hers as real evidence of hostility or lack of interest, he is failing her where she feels it most keenly, and is beginning to lose his control of her erotically. If he continues to be switched off the main track by her well-nigh inquisitorial attitude he as much as admits to her that he is not longer able to come up to her standards—a humiliating admission for any man to make to any woman.
Kittens are born blind. Women are born love-blind. No woman is other than anesthetic, which means “not perceiving” until she has perceived something. And there is nothing for her to perceive except what her husband does.
Woman’s negative control, coming as it does from her anesthesia which is innate in her and is removed only by the proper kind of marriage, makes her “uncertain, coy and hard to please.” If not met and handled erotically by a man who has abandoned autoerotism, it develops in her a degree of opposition, antagonism, obstinacy and resistance that is completely misunderstood by a man without erotic insight.