It may be said that a man’s satisfaction is none the less selfish, even though it be conditioned on a woman’s. But the self-satisfaction which _excludes_ that of the woman must be greater in selfishness and actually less human. In fact this reciprocal self-satisfaction is the distinguishing human trait without which the sex life of most marriages, like all prostitution, is not other than animal heat. A man frequently thinks he has to make a conscious choice between courses of action that are predominantly egoistic-social or erotic. He thinks of the erotic life as taking time, and incidentally money in the time lost alone, to pay enough attention to a woman to develop her erotic possibilities, and many men acting under this false impression that erotism weakens practical accomplishment, have decided that the egoistic-social path was the more attractive. But even they can never free themselves from the promptings of the erotic impulse. Such men, thinking erroneously that all sexual acts are erotic, making as they do no distinction between the two, believe that they have somehow fulfilled an erotic need by keeping a woman, either a wife or a mistress. This travesty of the truly erotic by a man who acts mainly from egoistic-social motives is self-deception. The two are not only not the same, but never can be made so. § 49 Many a young man making a success of his business, paying off his debts and beginning to pile up money, lets up a bit from the strain of business and begins to look about him for amusement keener than the ordinary recreations. He meets an attractive young woman, puts her down mentally as not quite up to his social scale, but finding her responsive determines to go as far with her as she will let him. Of course this is starting wrongly, on the basis of not so much making her an integral part of his own personality as trying to find in her an objective and nearly impersonal means of procuring autoerotic pleasure for himself. Not how he pleases her is his ultimate thought but how she pleases him. It has possibly not occurred to him that he likes her because he likes the effects she produces in him and that no matter how much money he lavishes on her, it is barter for certain privileges she permits him to take with her. These privileges are not the highest and greatest he could avail himself of, with a woman he would make his wife, the chief privilege being that of developing himself through her and incidentally of developing her to the highest degree of which she is capable.