The man who desires a wife either for the purely sexual or for the purely domestic motive has no conception of marriage whatever. If he is influenced either consciously, or unconsciously by such a motive he might as far as his own sole advantage is concerned, confine himself to sexual affairs with prostitutes. He is unaware of the new light that has been thrown on love by the recently acquired knowledge of the work of the ductless glands. He has never heard of them, of course, and could not be expected to know how intimately they are connected with each other and with his entire mental and physical welfare.
What he later finds out, and that with no help whatever from science, but from tough experience, is that the two things that he craves—namely, sexual satisfaction and all the good things of domestic life—are in some way inevitably and more and more sundered. His wife either is and remains “cold” or acquires suddenly or gradually a coolness which increases to actual pseudo-frigidity. He notices a change in her. He knows he has not himself changed.
The change should have been in him and then there would have been in her a change which would have gratified him instead of disappointing him. But, never having been taught how to behave in the most intimate relations of marriage, he is feeling the results of his ignorance just as would a landlubber feel eventually the resulting shipwreck if he undertook, or were forced against his will, to pilot a big ship. The husband should be the matrimonial pilot, but he has received no course of instruction in that form of navigation.
§ 149
Haste in the husband comes primarily from fear. Fear makes the thief hurry through his thieving. The pickpocket must be so deft and swift that the victim’s consciousness is not aroused to the theft. But a true husband-lover is not, in the love episode, stealing anything from his wife, no matter how much his actions may resemble those of a thief. His aim should be not to avoid arousing her consciousness, but to awaken it to the gift he is offering her.
Fear makes anyone telescope, curtail, syncopate and abbreviate any act, selecting out of all the portions of the act some element of it, considered perhaps the cream of it, and cutting out all the rest of it. Fear alone—the fear felt by the thief—is unconscious motive enough for haste on the husband’s part. If he did not fear her erotic acme, or her reactions that occur prior to it, he would not repress them, or allow her to repress them. Why should he fear to give his wife the same erotic acme in every love episode that he uniformly gives himself?
He fears—unconsciously, to be sure, for the most part—that, if his wife develops so strong an erotic reaction, she may have an irresistible craving to satisfy herself when he is not present, thus giving herself to another.
Haste in the husband is therefore due to a fear that he may lose his wife’s passion, if it be aroused. He does not realize that the modern educated civilized woman is unable to give herself to any but the one man who has first aroused her deepest passion; and that the more educated and cultivated she is, the more surely she is centred upon the one man about whose being the entire erotic sphere rotates as on an axis.
Man’s fear that his wife may be or become “oversexed” is at least a part of the cause for his haste in the love episode. Unconsciously, of course, he does not want her to have the same ecstatic pleasure as he has himself. Not only because, in his squinting regard, this puts her in the prostitute class, but also because he fears her becoming too passionate for one man and therefore requiring two or more. This is based on an undercurrent of opinion among men that a woman’s sexuality is fundamentally stronger than a man’s; and that her comparative leisure in view of his own, will tend to foster in her the desire for sexual gratification.
Added to this is the other erroneous supposition, common among ignorant men, that excessive indulgence in the pleasures of the love episode has a weakening effect on the man. Viewed as excretions, as the seminal products have been until today, it would seem quite illogical to fear an evacuation of these at least once a day. But although they have been regarded as excreta, there has always been an unconscious belief in men that their retention somehow strengthened the brain. Still a way has been pointed out (see [§ 100]) for the love episodes to be continued without this fear.