If, as assumed broadly above, the remedy for the ills which beset the
married life which is guided by instinct alone are more excitement for
the woman and less for the man, this only in one way suggests a balance
which (as many wives consciously or unconsciously perceive) grows less
and less as the years go on.
The man advances in his profession, makes more money, gains more or less
gratifying triumphs in the world of affairs, joins a club or lodge, meets
and has more or less stimulating contacts with more and more of his
fellow-men. His wife the while remains mostly in the home, is restricted
by the necessity of care of children, if any. If there are no children,
she is generally steered by her husband into the least stimulating life
possible, for he knows unconsciously that the interest of his wife in
other people is mildly displeasing to him. He wishes to own her all—her
actions, her thoughts. If he does not someone else will, and she will
be, to that extent, not his. It will be difficult for him to reason that
this type of ownership is merely the gratification of an egoistic-social
instinct. If there is one thing a man should not, for his own erotic
interests, want to do, that thing is the establishing of an ownership or
possession. Ownership of wives dates back at least to the early Roman
times when one had to own and control one’s wife’s whereabouts in order
to satisfy oneself, and one’s neighbours, that one’s freeborn children
were one’s own.
As a gratification of the egoistic-social instinct, ownership of the
wife’s person, property, actions and thoughts is in direct antagonism
with pure love instinct, which controls most satisfactorily and
gratefully when there is no egoistic-social compulsion acting through
husband on wife. Pure love instinct is gratified only when the control is
perfected by eliminating all egoistic-social motives of husband or wife
from the situation.
This is realized by some young women who marry but insist that they be
not supported by their husbands.
CHAPTER VII
THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE
§ 170
Those who marry from merely physical sexual motives, who overemphasize or
overweight the physical side of sex, are not able to gain from marriage
what the rationally controlled love episode can give them. They naturally
never admit that this is the case. They frequently do not know it
themselves.
They think perhaps that they are putting the love instinct ahead of
the egoistic-social, but their knowledge of men, women and things is
defective.
They are to a certain degree anesthetic in the etymological sense,
because they do not know how to live most fully. They are in a position
similar to a child who should find a package of new thousand-dollar
bills, and take them out into the street and play with them. They are
infantile in appreciation of values, which, however, they may later learn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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