CHAPTER XXXI PERFECT MATRIMONIAL ADJUSTMENTS While marriage, regardless of whatever form it may assume, has always been mentioned in this book as unavoidably related to love, we must not blink the fact that marriage and love are two absolutely different things forced into frequent association by social and economic necessity. Love is an involuntary and compulsory craving which draws a male and a female into the closest possible union for the purpose of mutual sexual gratification, generally followed by conception and reproduction. =Marriage a Compromise.= Marriage on the other hand is merely a compromise between the positive individual cravings which demand the most complete and frequent gratification of the love urge, regardless of its consequences, and the negative feeling which causes the community to shirk all possible responsibilities incurred by the individual, among others, the support of pregnant or lactating females and of helpless infants. Unless the community owns mother and child and can exploit their labor or receive their cash value (slavery system), it demands that their owner, the impregnator of the woman and procreator of the child, supply food and shelter for both. Marriage is also a compromise between two individual cravings which may not be synchronised, as the male's desire for the female may subside before her desire for him does, or reciprocally. Through the institution of marriage the community protects itself against new burdens directly by penalties (sentences against wife deserters or those who abandon children) and indirectly by protecting the mates against their own cravings for whose duration they are not responsible (laws against bigamy or adultery, etc.). =Considering the Artificial Character of the Marriage Union=, and at the same time the psychological importance of its durability as far as the mental health of the off-spring is concerned, one of the most pressing duties of the community (and one which it never performs), should be to devise all the possible ways and means whereby the sex cravings of both mates could be helped to retain their freshness and strength as long as possible. =Attractiveness an Asset.= The first thought which should be forced into the minds of modern men and women is that attractiveness is a positive asset not only to woman but to man. In classic Greece, a man could not be merely good, he had to be beautiful too. By "good" the Greek meant "fit" but in the compound word which implied both qualities, _kalos_, beauty came first. Cravings being awakened and kept alive by certain fetishes, the individual should be trained to recognize his and his mate's fetishism and to make all possible efforts to retain, if necessary by artificial means, the fetishes which lead to the awakening of erotism between him and his mate.