Of course, why not? Should one expect every day to be cloudy? Must we expect our lives to be unhappy? Is it wholesome to live in an atmosphere of tragedy? Not to have perfect married love is to act lower than the animals—to have abolished instinct, by which they act, and not to have attained knowledge, according to which are regulated the acts of all adepts in the art of love. THE SURPRISE OF THE PERFECTLY MARRIED _What? Do you mean to tell me that every married couple do not go through the same perfect type of love episode we do every day or two? Why, we have never had anything else from the very first and supposed, of course, everybody else was exactly like us._ Of course, they do not. You see how people _look_, don’t you, after a few years of marriage? CHAPTER II MODERN EMOTIONAL UNREST Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds. SHAKESPEARE, _Sonnet_ CXVI. § 11 This book is written largely in the hope that the thousands of unhappy married women, and the unmarried too, as fate sometimes suddenly and unexpectedly finds them a partner, will, in reading it, realize what is making them so restless and discontented. In the past few years all interested observers of social phenomena have been appalled at the lightness with which a great majority of the upper middle classes regard matrimony. Intelligent women, readers of good books, and themselves often friends of authors, artists, musicians, and other creative personalities are all absorbed in the most vital topics of the day, chief of which is the discussion of the normal adjustment of the sex relation. Indeed, it has been charged that both women and men in this stratum of society talk sex _ad nauseam_. This is likely to continue until the much desired adjustment is better made than it is at present. The cause of this concentration upon sex problems can be only the fact that sex is a problem. If our sexual standards were fixed in a universally serviceable pattern such that changing external conditions did not almost hourly tend to make it antiquated and useless, the attention of so large a proportion of civilized humanity need not be given to it in the present-day excited manner. It is, of course, a question whether sexual problems can ever be permanently solved; but those in the focus of public attention today are so insistent that it is impossible to ignore them. Various solutions are being attempted more or less secretly where public opinion’s ban on sex discussion is stronger; less secretly elsewhere.