The even unconscious knowledge that this has not been accomplished is the little rift within the lute of married life that increases until their relations eventually become no longer sweet bells, but jangled out of tune and harsh. No matter how much intellectual congeniality there may be between the married partners, which is a factor more egoistic-social than erotic, this lack of unconscious rapport is actually sensed, though not directly. With characteristically human proclivity to rationalize (instead of to know facts and to reason from them), husband and wife begin to disagree upon points apparently most remote from anything erotic, as for example the position of pieces of furniture in the house, or the thousand and one details of solely egoistic-social import. This does not mean at all that they are not going to have differences of opinion. On the contrary, honest differences of opinion and taste are to be acknowledged by each as proof of the other’s positiveness of character; and the surprises caused in the husband by the unexpected reactions of his wife to all sorts of situations, chiefly egoistic-social ones, are part of the variety which is the spice of marital living. They congratulate themselves that their disagreements and disputes do not concern really fundamental things, though if they but knew it, there would be now, as there once was (but they have forgotten), no question raised about such matters simply because such matters do not belong to the sphere of marital erotism. Complete erotic mutuality based on the proper “firing order” of the love emotions of husband and wife, distinctly separates and keeps separate and apart from the single erotic sphere, where the twain are one flesh, their two individual spheres of their separate egoistic-social impulses and activities. The husband leaves unquestioned all of these activities of his wife and vice versa. There thus emerges with increasing clearness the prime importance of the distinction between erotic and egoistic-social impulses and activities, and with this distinction grows the unalterable conviction, from every aspect of human values, of the unquestionable superiority of the erotic sphere over the egoistic-social spheres. It is a matter of scientific proof of the last few years, too, that in the married relation this ascendancy of the erotic over the egoistic-social sphere is not only conducive to the greatest health, happiness and longevity but also productive of the greatest material success. The most successful men and women, from every point of view from the material to the spiritual, are the men who have secured, and the women who have experienced, this truly human erotic mutuality. § 26