The moment an anthropoid human realizes what he is _getting_ from the promiscuous relations, and that he is autoerotically getting in a _puerile_ way instead of giving in a _virile_ way, he takes no more interest whatever in the promiscuous relation. The reply to an obvious objection here is that if he finds his wife lacking in passion it means he has not learned to know his wife, and, if he thinks he finds more passion in the extra-marital woman, he is either deceiving himself or being deceived by her, the extra-marital one; and that he is _sexually as anesthetic to all women_ as he fancies his wife to be anesthetic to him. Unless she is a chronic invalid he has no justification in thinking that passion is impossible between them. He has not the knowledge of himself wherewith to develop in himself enough virility to awaken her erotic instincts. When once awakened these will adequately satisfy him. If he has not aroused them in his wife there is little chance that he will arouse a real feeling in other women. If he cannot consistently be satisfied with one woman and believes that men are incurably polygamous, let him, first, be sure to sound his wife’s erotism to the bottom, and he will then need no other woman nor fatuously imagine he wants another. This is the surest cure for the polygamous-nature-of-man delusion. The errant husband may think he roves in search of a real woman. As husband he has a real woman by his side; but, having a real woman as near to him as he can bring himself to approach, he wanders forth in search of an imaginary woman, who does not exist in reality. There is no such thing as the imaginary woman except in his mind. His virile function is to make over this real woman at his side according to the mental pattern he has of woman as she should be, and within reasonable limits he can do it, if he has the virile strength to control his own emotions in her presence. If he cannot do it in hers he cannot do it in another woman’s, just because he has failed to do so in his wife’s. The answer will of course be made that a man may marry a shrew. To this the reply is that a shrew like Katharine in Shakespeare’s play is a woman who has not been taught to love as every wife should be. A shrew is simply a woman not yet erotically developed. It may, to be sure, take a more than ordinarily ardent lover to develop such a woman, but barring the exceedingly rare cases of women in whom love is a physical impossibility, the shrewishness of a woman is only a measure of the inadequacy of the husband. Except for the sporadic freaks of nature there is no such thing as an impossible woman. § 21 _Mutuality_