Today there is nothing, even in the ordinary every-day service a man receives from his wife that he would not rather have servants do for him—cooking, house-tending, clothes-mending or the supervision of these. If he were rich enough he would.
But the personality reaction in the most intimate psychical as well as physical relations of married life he can secure from no other than a true wife, and in no other sphere than the exclusively erotic and in no other way than as she, like the vibrating string of a musical instrument, responds to his technique.
§ 144
The main thesis of this book is that in the instincts and emotions of love the self-control of the husband and, through this, his control of the exclusively erotic emotions of his wife are essential to a successful marriage.
A continuous interplay of control on the egoistic-social level between husband and wife tends to exist in all marriages. There is an impulse in women to control the actions of men at this level quite as much as men attempt to control women. But the control of the egoistic-social impulses of each by the other has nothing to do with real marriage, and the impulses and emotions peculiar to it, which are erotic only and, at that, subject to a one-way control.
In the sphere of the erotic emotions man should be supreme. Neither husband nor wife is ever really happy unless he has this control, and is indifferent to the other control on the egoistic-social level.
The facts that control is neither annihilation nor repression, that control is of the very essence of personality and individuality, that biologically man’s control of woman is the only control needed in the erotic sphere, and that woman, not being able to control there (and feeling, if she be not controlled, a need which she unconsciously interprets as a need to control others)—all these are facts that are of slight importance, however striking they may be, compared with the fact that man, on the average, is brought up without knowledge of the erotic control he needs to assume in order to make both himself and his wife happy.
The unsatisfied woman experiences the fact that she has bestowed upon her mate unutterable joy and bliss. A satisfied woman’s recognition of this fact, however, cannot occur at the same time that her own erotic acme takes place, for at that particular time she is as oblivious to anything save her own sensations as if she were the only being existing in the universe, and her sensations are as indefinite and infinite as though she were taking chloroform. She must, in all the processes leading up to her temporary psychic dissolution, realize that these processes are being accomplished for her by the being and doing of her husband-lover. She may not ever know exactly what he does do, but she is translated—and by her husband.