These are the arguments advanced for the use of alcohol also. While admitting, however, the desirability, indeed even the necessity, of variety in life which means the family life as well, we should not forget that the lack of variety in marital existence is mostly if not exclusively due to the infantility of the husband. Marriage is the most vital institution of society, but the one that has been most carelessly left to its own haphazard development. For this abandonment of marriage to its own fate amidst the most hostile possible environment of rapidly developing egoistic-social impulses, the husband is solely to blame. His fault, however, is primarily due to his bringing up and chiefly to that feature of the mother-imago which leads him invariably to look for interest, variety and all good things from the mother. The child’s frequent whine, “Mother, what can I _do_?” is here virtually repeated by the unimaginative husband, defended by the sexologist and answered by the prostitute. If, as has been intimated before in this book, age cannot wither woman nor custom stale her infinite variety, then the infinite variety, or enough of it, at any rate, to satisfy any husband, should be evoked from his wife. In the fragmentary love of the average married man it is not to be expected, of course, that he will find much variety. For fragments do not, or at any rate, a single fragment does not, provide much. The relief from the monotony of the average married life is most desirable in every way, but the relief can come in the best way only from the variegation of the marital pattern, a change that is fully within the power of any husband who will acquaint himself with the findings of the modern psychology of love. CHAPTER IX THE NEW MARRIAGE Certain it is that the chrysalis, man, is emerging from the cocoon of tradition.—DR. ROBIE. § 199 The new husband is the man who realizes that the type of passion which he has idealized to himself as appropriate for himself is logically quite as appropriate for his wife. Quite as logically he may deduce that if there is, therefore, to be not only no double standard with regard to promiscuity, but also no double standard with regard to the rights to erotic exaltation, he may create a single standard by means of reducing the number of his love episodes to a minimum of intercourse for procreation only. Many men have done this or nearly this. But all who try it find that there are two sets of difficulties in the way, the difficulty of attaining this semi-ascetic end from the purely volitional point of view, and the difficulty, or more exactly the detriment, which modern science is beginning to demonstrate as inevitably coming to the psychic as well as the physical powers of the ascetic individual.