It is believed, on the authority of physicians and such others as have studied the subject, that the love episode, in about seventy per cent of civilized marriages, is but a one-sided affair from the first. This is due almost exclusively to the impetuosity of the husband during the first weeks of marriage. Sometimes under the inspiration of the purity of his bride-to-be, or from an increased cautiousness against the chances of contracting venereal disease, he abstains from resorting to prostitutes. If this practice of his has come from a belief on his part that he was obliged, as he believes all men are, to relax his sexual tension periodically, he will generally believe that his temporary pre-marital continence is piling up tension in him, and he will approach his bride for the first time with an idea probably that his tension is greater than it has ever been in his life. A very important distinction must here be kept in mind; namely, that between the perfect erotic love episode, free from conflict, and involving both hyper- and hyposomatic levels of the personality, and the imperfect, illicit sex act. It has been pointed out[24] that the physical sex act does not relax a true love tension, that the instinct itself may not be satisfied even with numerous hyposomatic sex activities. If, therefore, the young husband be of the type that believes that an illicit sex act invariably produces the desired relaxation of erotic tension, he will be the more likely to give way to an impulse that has a large proportion of the purely hyposomatic (or physical) factor in it. This abandon on his part will exclude all possibility of mutuality. He will thus lose at the start the possibility of that control which he might have gained over his wife’s erotic reactions, had he been able to control his own. And he would have been able to control his own but for the erroneous belief that the tensions he relaxed clandestinely with the _demimondaine_ were the main tensions, which undoubtedly they are not. It is obvious that the annihilation of his bride’s natural responsive actions that results from his faulty procedure is fatal to married happiness. § 148