Her reactions on the contrary should have such a degree of spontaneity and unreflective artlessness as to give him assurance of their being true unmeditated responses as sure and inevitable as the chemical action in an opening flower, but as purely hypersomatic (spiritual) as they are inevitable. Otherwise, he will never be able to know her as she is. He will know her as the traditional suggestion of her environment has taught her to be. This pervasive influence of environment, which is well enough in egoistic-social impulses, is wholly out of place in the erotic sphere. The truly modern husband will wish more than any other thing to know his wife as he himself alone can know her, and will more and more consciously resent, as the century grows older, any egoistic-social conventionality slipping into the purely erotic. In order for him to gain his greatest joy from marriage with this particular woman, she will have to be made _sui generis_. The only means toward this end is her utterly unpremeditated, spontaneous response, unclouded by the suggestions of tradition as to how she ought to respond. A woman thus rendered _sui generis_ by her husband’s erotic control will more than fulfil any requirements or specifications of a pattern of romantic love. Such a woman, thus known by a fully percipient husband, takes on for him a value, transcending far those of the ordinary so-called loves of the every-day, mildly contented variety, and becomes for him alone, incandescent with vitality. The considerations offered in the preceding paragraphs point to the conclusion that the average man’s lack of erotic control is due first of all to his mental autoerotism. Man’s lack of erotic control is due also partly to a certain anesthesia on his part, taking the word in its etymological sense of a failure to perceive. He fails to perceive that his function in married life is giving and not receiving. He also fails to perceive the difference between woman’s spontaneous reactions and those suggested to her by her environment. He fails to perceive that woman’s resistance has a deep biological cause and that she is unconsciously forced to test him hourly. He fails to perceive that she inevitably confuses erotic and egoistic-social instincts. § 146 The man to whom the love episode is only an animal sex act, a swift and dizzy whirl, is one who, so to speak does not in advance plot out the trajectory of this flight, does not let the component factors enter his consciousness for long enough to observe them and devote some conscious love to them. These innate associations are there in his unconscious; but his training has repressed them. Such a man to whom the love episode is like a swift gulping of strong liquor has no time to reflect upon its various bouquets and glints in natural and artificial light.