This hastiness marks the love episode on the part of the average man.
What he wants is a reaction that is to take place in himself, for which
his bride is merely the external complementary mechanism. The purely
mechanical side of this he could either purchase from a courtesan or
seize against her will from an innocent “honest” girl, but he fears
venereal disease in the former and trouble of accidental paternity or
discovery or both in the case of the latter. Eventually he regards both
types of women with equal impersonality. Either is merely food for his
sexual (not erotic in the highest sense) hunger, and it is his own sex
hunger that he is bent on appeasing, with absolutely no idea of the
difference in erotic value between the two types of women, in the way he
acts. There is none, for neither is more appropriate to his spiritual
need than hay would be for his stomach.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account