In the minds of young lovers no doubt exists that their love should be
mutual. The doubt comes later in their married life that possibly some
impediment either existed in a latent state before they were married
and has developed since, so that they ceased to be mutual; or, not
previously existing, was developed by some factor in their later married
life unforeseen in their earlier days and therefore impossible to avoid.
In the creation and maintenance of mutuality in the early married life
the young husband is the only one concerned. If there is real mutuality
caused by a perfect response in his bride, he can maintain it only if
he knows how he has gained it. If it was gained by merely instinctive
actions on his own part, and if he is impressed by the beauty of the
mystery, and repeats to himself how wonderful it is, and how inexplicable
to have so warm a response, he will not have a good chance of continuing
it. He will have to do what he has not yet done. Consciously, and
purposefully, he will observe his wife’s reactions during the entirety of
the love episode; that is, from the beginning of one quite through to the
beginning of the next one, not merely the period of the highest level of
erotic excitement.
It is the privilege of woman to remain autoerotic in her reactions. She
may or may not rise to allerotic action during her entire life. But man
can never succeed in the marital life if he remains autoerotic. His first
reactions to the marital situation are necessarily autoerotic. He cannot
avoid that. His previous experience with women, if any, and particularly
with prostitutes, gives him at first little if any opportunity to be
with his wife other than essentially autoerotic in his reactions. A
man’s first experience of a woman in an attempt at a love episode is
invariably a bath of absolutely new sensations, a plunge into a sea of
diverse stimuli, a medium in which many men flounder for the remainder
of their lives, gaining each time no more than an uncoördinated congeries
of external excitement in which they act in no controlling manner. Such
men never mate a woman in the highest sense. They only supply her with a
child in the guise of a husband. There is no mutuality between the surf
and the bather who is helplessly tossed about in the breakers and is
finally washed up on the shore and left breathless by his contact with
the countless laughter of the sea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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