Kisses may stale but the occasional practice of this reserve on the husband’s part in the love episode will never stale, but will compare to the recharging of an exhausted battery, to the filling of a vessel drained, to the incoming tide. It is a far greater stimulant to happiness of all kinds than anything else discovered by mankind. That this is rare and exceedingly hard to get, and that it involves self-control on the part of the husband and abandonment of self-control on the part of the wife, makes it like one of those elements in the erotic situation mentioned by Freud as having been necessarily injected into it by man, whenever he found love too easy and too free. “It is easy to prove that the psychical value of the need for love sinks, as soon as its satisfaction is made easy. An obstruction is needed to drive the libido upward, and where the natural obstructions to satisfaction do not apply, men have at all times conventionally inserted them, in order to be able to enjoy love. This is true of individuals as well as of nations. In times when the satisfaction of love found no difficulties, as occasionally during the fall of ancient civilizations, love became worthless and life empty, and there was necessary a strong reactionary influence to restore the indispensable emotional values.”[20] It is hard enough for any man to hold in check any instinct; but, when he is holding the love instinct in check, in the face of everything including his wife herself, unanimously calling upon him to throw away all restraint, it becomes the most difficult, and (because of its results, not its difficulty) the most desirable accomplishment possible. It is hard for a woman of refinement, culture and puritanical antecedents to relax the inhibitions necessary to be relaxed in order for her to gain her own erotic acme. If she realizes that her husband must have his, anyway, regardless of hers, this realization makes her still less able to relax. § 103 If on the other hand she is assured by experience from the first that her erotic acme will be taken care of with absolute reliability by the only person in the world who can insure its coming, her own inhibitions are much more likely to be overcome, and she to become relaxed and open to him at his approach. The vital importance, therefore, to the man, of doing everything in his power to make himself absolutely sure, even from the very first, that the erotic needs of his wife are amply taken care of by him, will be clearly seen when he realizes that if he does not do it himself, instinct (which is as strong in a woman as it is in a man) will ceaselessly pull her in the direction of getting these needs supplied by some other man. If the husband has not the strength of will to overcome his own instincts to the minor degree of retarding, for his wife’s health, the relaxation of his own erotic tension he will be unable consistently to blame her.