Not only all conscious and unconscious love cravings can, but all should be satisfied in every marriage from the beginning of it all through to the end of it. By the majority of healthy people they should be given conscious expression by both mates much more frequently than they actually are. § 9 So many unhappily married people ask, “What, Doctor, _is_ a normal sex life?” It is generally considered by all authorities that individuals vary to such an extent that it is impossible to lay down any rule except that in the normal sex life the conscious outward expression should never take place except when it is a mutual and reciprocal expression, and that, on these conditions, no limits that could be called normal really exist. But the attitude of this book is that the mutuality is largely if not entirely the result of the husband’s love-making. In the ideal marriage he is and always should be the leading factor in the exclusively erotic sphere. § 10 Every use of the term erotic episode or love episode or love drama, is to be understood as emphatically affirming the indispensability of an equal emphasis on both the so-called physical and the so-called mental or spiritual factor of the love life, neither one nor the other omitted, neither one nor the other unduly overweighted. We are minds or souls inhabiting or, better, organically connected with bodies. Everyone knows the body cannot be neglected any more than the mind. But the most mental of the bodily reactions and the most bodily of the mental reactions are the emotions; and as far as present-day physiological researches have been able to discover, both are most closely interrelated by the interlocking system of ductless glands, among which the interstitial or sexual glands are the grand president of all the boards of directors.[3] Tradition first, in classical Greek and Roman times, unduly overweighted the physical end and, in modern times, has attempted unduly to overweight the spiritual end of the balance, but neither of these processes has restored a balance which is fundamental to the highest type of Christianity—the balance between the erotic[4] and the egoistic-social trends.[5] This balance it is the object of this book to suggest, with the hope that such an approach to equilibrium of two tendencies that are now badly out of balance will help to show the futility of much activity that is now called civilized, but which is not most adapted to producing the greatest happiness of the individual, and through that, the greatest prosperity of such people as are destined by happiness and prosperity to survive the crumbling of the present state of society. THE SURPRISE OF THE IMPERFECTLY MARRIED _What? Every pair in every marriage attain absolute bliss in every love episode? Do you mean to tell me that the rose mist of dawn lasts through the entire day?_