The instinct behind marriage is often a feeling of chivalrous devotion towards a tender and confiding girl, and the desire to give her every protection. The man finds, however, that his act has placed the one whom he desired to _protect_ in such a position that she must bear the greatest burden possible for a human being to bear, and must bear it alone. This must be a deep distress to an imaginative man of integrity, although the distress be mingled with other and joyous feelings. To pretend that it is not so, to say that the joy of coming parenthood should and does wipe out all such under-currents of thought is merely to be callous or silly. To repress an intense feeling, to pretend that it is not there, may give an apparent surface bravery or brightness. But such repression is ultimately destructive to the consciousness and whole physique of the one who, thus gallantly to himself, endeavours to deny the truth, and is often apt to lead to deeper disorders. The modern school of psycho-analysts who endeavour to set right the effects of mental strain often discover that throughout life, perhaps dating from childhood, a personality has been handicapped and weakened by some deep suppression of an intensely experienced emotion. In my opinion, the pretence that a sensitive man does not feel, and does not endeavour to conceal his feeling about his relation to his wife, particularly at the time of their first coming parenthood is to dishonour man’s capacity and his imagination. Why imply that a rational man does not experience what surely all but a brute must feel. It impoverishes our life of emotional expression, and it tends to injure the man himself, to increase the strain by the pretence that the strain is not there. I know, for instance, one man who fainted at the time his wife gave birth to their child, and who, under no consideration, would allow her to have a second child, although he had intensely desired and looked forward to the fatherhood of a large family before he knew the actual physical experiences which it entailed. Such a man, in my opinion, was a good father wasted by an excess of emotion made all the more intensely destructive to himself by the endeavour to maintain the totally artificial and indeed the crude attitude which is supposed to be “correct” for a man, namely a sort of dissociation of himself from his wife’s experiences and a hardened lack of recognition of all that is involved. It is surely better to recognize that there is that intense and poignant sense of helplessness, that the sensitive and developed young man should and does feel it, but that it should be recognized as the compensating price which he pays for fatherhood.