It has been clearly shown that this termination when, as is frequently the case, it is accompanied by sudden and severe pain on the rupture of the hymen, is the cause of a revulsion of feeling on the woman’s part, utterly incommensurate with the actual intensity and duration of the pain, a feeling also of which she never is, and possibly never becomes, directly conscious; but, if the pain is caused by the action of the husband, it is the cause of a resentment which, in the wife’s unconscious, is ever after associated with her husband. From this point of view it would seem more felicitous if that unconscious association of ideas could be made in her mind with some other man, e.g., the family doctor, if it is an inevitable association and absolutely uncontrollable by the wife, as all deeply unconscious mental processes are. It would seem that a man would profit by not being the particular man associated in his wife’s unconscious with a painful incident that cuts so deep. This applies to the average uninstructed man but not to the adept or even inexperienced man who is willing and able to act intelligently and profit by the knowledge now available about how to avoid this one of the many mischances that may occur in the case of the virgin episode. This phenomenon of the unconscious resentment due to the forcible and painful termination of merely physical virginity is recognized in the frequently happy second married life of women who have lost their first husbands, and in the customs of some savage tribes in which no woman becomes a wife until she has been deflowered by the official appointed by the tribe for that special purpose. The inference from these facts is not necessarily that a man will be more happy with a wife who comes to him “impure” or widowed; though this may be the case. The inference is on the other hand that the man, if he knows enough, will be able in the very first love episode so to act that the bride inflicts any necessary pain on herself, and not he on her; making all the difference in the world to her, because in this case, never, even in her own unconscious, can she lay up against her husband this cause of resentment. The technically instructed husband thus gains an initial prestige with his wife and with her unconscious, which enormously increases his erotic control of her emotions—the _sine qua non_ of a felicitous marriage, that essential condition for fully functioning adult human life. § 212 Women are unable to control or direct their own development in the erotic sphere up to the point of greatest exaltation. They are perforce required to be developed by men. But, in from fifty to seventy per cent of marriages, men are too uninterested or too ignorant to develop their wives’ erotism to this point, and, of course, to develop their own erotism to the necessary degree of self-control whereby they can secure the total erotic relaxation of their wives.