=Interest in Husband's Affairs.= Be interested in your husband's affairs. No matter what your husband's occupation may be, you should possess enough intelligence to be able to understand what he is doing. It is almost unbelievable how little some wives know about their husband's profession or work. It is a bad thing when strange women understand your husband's work better than you do, and when he finds in them more intelligent and more sympathetic listeners. He may go to them for sympathy. If your husband is a scientist or a research worker or a professional man it is not necessary that you be familiar with all the details of his work, but with the general character you should be. And if you can be of assistance to him in his work, if it be only looking up references, compiling tables and statistics or merely typewriting, it will be appreciated by him, and will sometimes help to knit the bonds a bit closer. There is another important reason for being interested in and understanding your husband's business. When the husband dies--and a man is not infrequently snatched away in the prime of youth and vigor--the wife is often left to the mercies of the cold world, without money and without a profession. If she understands the husband's business she can continue it and remain economically independent. This has reference not only to ordinary business, like stores or agencies, but to more or less specialized occupations, such for instance as publishing. We know the cases of two widows of publishers of medical journals. When their husbands died everybody was commiserating with them: what will they make a living from? But they understood the details of their husbands' business, and they kept right on. And now those journals are financially more successful than they were when the husbands were at the helm. =Wife's Behavior Toward Sexual Relations.= I am now coming to a delicate subject. But, delicate though it is, it must be dealt with unflinchingly, because it is probably responsible for more male infidelity than all other causes combined. I speak of the relation of the wife to her marital duties, in other words, to sexual relations. Too many women regard the sexual act as a nuisance, as an ordeal, as something disagreeable to get through with as quickly as possible; they regard the husband's demands in this line as an imposition, as unfair or even as brutal; and their behavior preliminary to and during the act is such as to cool the ardor of any refined and sensitive man. The reasons for this behavior on the part of many wives are manifold; this is not the place to consider them in detail. I will allude to them briefly. One great cause is congenital frigidity. The woman is cold, frigid, has no desire for sex relations and experiences no pleasure, no sensation from them. Such women are not to blame; they are to be pitied. But even they can behave so as not to repel their husbands. (See Chapter XLIII).