The concept of romantic love, like that of love at first sight, contains the implication that love and especially married love depends more upon what Fate or Destiny vouchsafes to the man than upon what he takes from Fate or creates for himself. The taking and creating is certainly the prerogative of the man while yet it may not necessarily belong to the woman. § 16 That is the essential difference between the masculine and the feminine nature. It is masculine to give and to create and to change external reality. It is feminine to receive, and to respond to the activity of the male. It is feminine to be thrilled at the effects produced upon the wife by her husband’s activities in every sphere of action. It is masculine to be thrilled only by the resultant ecstasies of the wife. It is not masculine to be emotionally impressed except by the results of his own individual and particular actions: results effected in other persons and things. This is the essential masculinity and femininity assumed in this book. It will be evident to those acquainted with modern psychology that the reverse of these conditions implies the interchange of masculine and feminine psychic natures. For example the man who should (and yet not a few do) derive his satisfactions solely from the emotions aroused in him by the actions of other persons and things is not truly masculine. His love could not in any real sense be called virile. § 17 Virile love is the only love that a man should have—the only feeling a real man _can_ have—for a woman. Indeed, it is the only way a man loves a woman if he is truly to be said to _love_ her. Any so-called love depending on being charmed by a woman is essentially effeminate, not virile. The moment he surrenders to her _charm_, he is not a man but an autoerotic[7] child. _He_ should absolutely and positively charm _her_. There is no disgrace, no lack of true femininity in a woman’s yielding to the power a man must exercise over her erotic instincts. The power is strictly a one-way power, exerted by the man upon the woman if, and only as long as, he remains man and she remains woman. The bisexual nature of both man and woman often permits a couple to reverse this direction of power influence.[8] If the wife’s charm is the only binding factor in a marriage the marriage is doomed to dissolve actually or potentially. And in order to maintain this merely superficial charm, which no real man needs to feel in a woman, she is obliged to resort to all varieties of artifice from the lip stick and the exotic perfume upward to the forced attempt to be intellectually frank and interesting. Woman as woman has no need for this artifice to maintain charm for primordial man.