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. § 135 This complete lack, on the woman’s part, of any ability whatsoever to secure erotic control over man leads her to try, unconsciously, of course, to compensate, for her inability in this region, by securing egoistic-social control over man. This she succeeds in doing every time she meets a man who has not yet developed from a mental autoerotism, in which he thinks that she has pleasures to bestow upon him and that he has to get them from her, with or without payment of egoistic-social services. It thus appears that woman not only has no exclusively erotic control, which by the nature of things belongs entirely to man where he has developed sufficiently to assume it, but also she invariably confuses the two types of control, getting a vicarious satisfaction from different forms of egoistic-social control, and missing, in a great number of instances, the deep biological and organic satisfactions from the exercise of control over her by the man. A hazy notion that happiness is her prerogative at least in the first months of her marriage leads many a woman to believe even to the extent of a virtual hallucination that she _is_ happy, i.e., that she is erotically controlled by her husband. A love episode in which this control has not been secured by her husband, or in which he may not even have tried to secure it leaves her in a state of psychical conflict. She consciously knows she ought to be supremely happy, unconsciously she feels blankly unhappy; and if, as so many women are, she is without erotic insight, she fancies that her husband has slighted her in some purely egoistic-social action.