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MARRIED LOVE
OR
LOVE IN MARRIAGE
MARRIED LOVE
LOVE IN MARRIAGE
BY
MARIE CARMICHAEL STOPES, Sc.D., Ph.D.
Wrrº Parracºs Anno Norms, ºr
WILLIAM J.ROBINSON, M.D.,
1918
THE CRITIC AND GUIDE COMPANY
12 MT. MORRIS PARK WEST
New York
Copyright, 1918.
By This Carric & Guinn Co.
DEDICATED TO
YOUNG HUSBANDS, AND ALL THOSE
WHO ARE BETROTHED IN LOVE
331764
EDITOR's PREFACE . . . . . . . . gº º ſº e º 'º
AUTHOR's PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CºArrºn
I. THE HEART's DESIRE . . . . . . . .
II. THE BROKEN Joy . . . . . . . . . .
III. Woman’s “CoNTRARINEss” . . . . . .
IV. The FUNDAMENTAL PULSE. . . . . . .
V. MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT . . . . . . . .
VI. SLEEP . . . . . . . . . tº e º º e e
VII. MoDESTY AND RomanCE . . . . . . .
VIII. ABSTINENCE . . . . . . . tº e º e >
IX. CHILDREN . . . . . . . . . © C tº o ſº
X. Society. . . . . . . . . . . . gº º de
XI. THE GLORIous UNFolding . . . . . .
167
INTRODUCTION
The truly monogamic couple, where the man
and the woman go chaste to the marriage-bed,
and go through life in mutual love and respect,
these feelings growing stronger as the years go
by, finding full satisfaction in each other, with-
out any desire for any othe man or woman—
what nobler, what more appealing ideal can one
conjure up? Nor is it an utterly unrealizable
ideal, for in spite of the sneers of the cynics,
there are such couples, even at the present time
and even in our largest Babylons. . . . .
We cannot prevent the cynics from sneering,
but even they must admit that monogamy is
here, is the dominant system, is the only socially
approved and legally permitted system, and we
have to deal with it. And those radical sexolo-
gists who do not believe that monogamy is the
best system of sexual relationship, who are sure
that it will not survive for all eternity, that it
will be replaced in the future by a higher ad-
justment, will agree, even if they do so reluc-
7
8 INTRODUCTION
tantly, that for a few years to come—say five
hundréd to a thousand—it will be the only feasi-
ble, the only socially admissible and legally
sanctioned system.
This being the case, it becomes the sexolo-
gist's most sacred duty to do everything in his
power to make the monogamic relationship as
pleasant as possible, to remove as far as possi-
ble all removable causes of friction, to steer
the frail matrimonial bark in safe channels, to
guard it from being wrecked on the Scylla of
asceticism or the Charybdis of excess; in short
to help the Man and the Woman to go through
life inmutual love and respect, finding full satis-
faction in each other, without any desire for any
other man or woman.
This is the object of Dr. Stopes’ fine book.
It would be too much to expect any one work to
succeed in converting every home from the hell
that it often is into the paradise that it should
be; but if a careful reading of it preserves the
temper of some men, improves the health and
cures the insomnia of some women, if it saves a
few homes from disruption, it will be decidedly
worth while, and its author will be called blessed
—and will deserve to be.
INTRODUCTION 9
There is plenty of love outside of marriage;
there is not enough in marriage; and they who
labor to augment and intensify Love in Mar-
riage are doing good pro-social work.
DR. WILLIAM J. BoBINson.
April 8, 1918.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
MoBE than ever to-day are happy homes
needed. It is my hope that this book may
serve the State by adding to their number. Its
object is to increase the joys of marriage, and
to show how much sorrow may be avoided.
The only secure basis for a present-day State
is the welding of its units in marriage: but
there is rottenness and danger at the founda-
tions of the State if many of the marriages are
unhappy. To-day, marriage is far less happy
than appears on the surface. Too many who
marry expecting joy are bitterly disappointed;
and the demand for “freedom” grows: while
those who cry aloud are generally unaware
that it is more likely to have been their own
ignorance than the “marriage-bond” which
was the origin of their unhappiness.
It is never easy to make marriage a lovely
thing; and it is an achievement beyond the
powers of the selfish, or the mentally cowardly.
Knowledge is needed, and as things are at pres-
11
12 AUTHOR's PREFACE
ent knowledge is almost unobtainable by those
who are most in want of it.
The problems of the sex-life are infinitely
complex, and for their solution urgently de-
mand both sympathy and scientific research.
I have some things to say about sex, which, so
far as I am aware, have not yet been said, or
if said will bear repeating and reemphasizing,
things which seem to me to be of profound im-
portance to men and women who hope to make
their marriage beautiful.
This little book is less a record of a research
than an attempt to present in easily under-
standable form the clarified and crystallized
results of long and patient investigations. Its
simple statements are based on a very large
number of first hand observations, on con-
fidences from men and women of all classes and
types, and on facts gleaned from wide reading.
My original contributions to the age-long
problems of marriage will be found principally
in Chapter IV; also in Chapters V and VIII.
The other chapters fill in what I hope is an
undistorted and unexaggerated picture of the
potential beauties and realities of marriage.
The whole is written simply, and for the or-
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 13
dinary untrained reader, though it embodies
some observations which will be new even to
those who have made scientific researches on
the subjects of sex and human physiology.
I do not touch here upon the many human
variations and abnormalities which bulk so
largely in most books on sex, nor do I deal with
the many problems raised by incurably unhap-
py marriages.
In the following pages I speak to those—and
in spite of all our neurotic literature and plays,
they are in the great majority—who are normal
and who are married or about to be married,
and hope, but do not know how, to make their
marriages happy and successful.
To the reticent, as to the conventional, it
may seem a presumption or a superfluity to
speak of the details of the most complex of all
human functions. They ask: Is not instinct
enough? The answer is: No, instinct is not
enough. In every other human activity it has
been realized that training is essential to crea-
tures of intellectual capacity like ourselves.
As Saleeby once wisely pointed out: A cat
knows how to manage her new-born kittens, how
to bring them up and teach them; a human
14 AUTHOR'S PREFACE
mother does not know how to manage her baby
unless she is trained, either directly or by her
own quick observation. A cat performs her
simple duties by instinct; a human mother has
to be trained to fulfill her very complex ones.
And the same is true, and even to a greater
extent, in the subtle complexities of sex. In
civilized countries, in modern times, the old
traditions, the profound primitive knowledge of
the needs of both. sexes have been lost—and
nothing but a muffled confusion of individual
gossip disturbs a silence, shame-faced or foul.
Here and there, in a family of fine tradition, a
youth or maiden may learn some of the mys-
teries of marriage, but the great majority of
people in the English speaking countries have
no glimmering of knowledge of the supreme
human art, the Art of Love. And even in books
on advanced Physiology and Medicine the gaps,
the omissions and even the misstatements, are
amazing.
In my own marriage I paid such a terrible
price for sex-ignorance that I feel that knowl-
edge gained at such a price should be placed at
the service of humanity.
In this book, average, healthy, mating crea-
tures who come within the limits of what may
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 15
be called “normal,” will find information which
should be known to every one of our race—but
is not—and which may save them years of
heartache and blind groping in the dark.
M. C. STOPEs.
LOVE IN MARRIAGE
CHAPTER I
THE HEART's DESTRE
“She gave him eomprehension of the meaning of love: a
word in many mouths, not often explained. With her, wound
in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify a new start in
our existenee, a finer shoot of the tree stoutly planted in good
gross earth; the senses running their live sap, and the minds
eompanioned, and the spirits made one by the whole-natured
conjunction. In sooth, a happy prospect for the sons and
daughters of Earth, divinely indicating more than happiness:
the speeding of us, eompact of what we are, between the
ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of
certain nobler races, new very dimly imagined.”—Grosse
Mrazeith, Dians of the Crossways.
EveRY heart desires a mate. For some rea-
son beyond our comprehension, nature has so
created us that we are incomplete in ourselves;
neither man nor woman singly can know the
joy in the performance of all the human func-
tions; neither man nor woman singly can create
another human being. This fact, which is ex-
17
18 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
pressed in our outward divergencies of form,
influences and colors the whole of our lives; and
there is nothing for which the innermost spirit
of one and all so yearns as for a sense of union
with another soul, and the perfecting of one-
self which such union brings.
In all young people, unless they have in-
herited depraved or diseased tendencies, the old
desire of our race springs up afresh in its pris-
tine beauty.
With the dreams and bodily changes of
adolescence, come to the youth and maiden the
strange and powerful impulses of sex. The
bodily differences of the two, now accentuated,
become mystical, alluring, enchanting in their
promise. Their differences unite and hold to-
gether the man and the woman so that their
bodily union is the solid nucleus of an immense
fabric of interwoven strands reaching to the
uttermost ends of the earth; some lighter than
the filmiest cobweb, or than the softest wave
of music, iridescent with the colors not only of
the visible rainbow, but of all the invisible
glories of the wave-lengths of the soul.
However much he may conceal it under as-
sumed cynicism, worldiness, or'self-seeking, the
heart of every young man yearns with a great
THE HEART's DESIRE 19
longing for the fulfilment of the beautiful dream
of a life-long union with a mate. Each heart
knows instinctively that it is only one’s mate
who can give full comprehension of all the po-
tential greatness in one’s soul, and have tender
laughter for all the child-like wonder that
lingers so enchantingly even in the white-haired.
The search for a mate is a quest for an un-
derstanding soul clothed in a body beautiful,
but unlike our own.
In the modern world, those who set off on
high endeavors. or who consciously separate
themselves from the ordinary course of social
life, are comparatively few, and it is not to
them I am speaking. The great majority of
our citizens—both men and women—after a
time of waiting, or of exploring, or of oscillat-
ing from one attraction to another, “settle
down” and marry. -
Very few are actually so cynical as to marry
without the hope of happiness; while most
young people, however their words may deny
it and however they may conceal their tender
hopes by an assumption of cynicism, reveal
that they are conscious of entering on a new
and glorious state by their radiant looks and
the joyous buoyancy of their actions. In the
20 LOVE IN MLARRLAGE
kisses and the hand-touch of the betrothed are a
zest and exhilaration which stir the blood like
wine. The two read poetry, listen entranced
to music which echoes the songs of their pulses,
and see reflected in each other’s eyes the beauty
of the world. In the midst of this celestial in-
toxication they naturally assume that, as they
are on the threshold of their lives, so too are
they in but the antechamber of their experience
of spiritual unity.
The more sensitive, the more romantic, and
the more idealistic is the young person of either
sex, the more his or her soul craves for some
kindred soul with whom the whole being can
unite. But all have some measure of this de-
sire, even the most prosaic, and we know from
innumerable stories that the sternest man of
affairs, he who may have worldly success of
every sort, may yet, through the lack of a real
mate, live with a sense almost as though the
limbs of his soul had been amputated. Ed-
ward Carpenter has beautifully' voiced this
longing:
“That there should exist one other person in the
world towards whom all openness of interchange
should establish itself, from whom there should be no
concealment; whose body should be as dear to one,
#
THE HEART'S DESIRE 21
in every part, as one's own; with whom there should
be no sense of Mine or Thine, in property or posses-
sion; into whose mind one's thoughts should naturally
flow, as it were to know themselves and to receive a
new illumination; and between whom and oneself
there should be a spontaneous rebound of sympathy
in all the joys and sorrows and experiences of life;
such is perhaps one of the dearest wishes of the soul.”
—Love's Coming of Age. -
It may chance that some one into whose hands
this book falls may protest that he or she has
never felt the fundamental yearning to form a
part of that trinity which alone is the perfect
expression of humanity. If that is the case,
it is possible that all unconsciously he may be
suffering from a real malady—sexual anes-
thesia. This is the name given to an inherent
coldness, which, while it lacks the usual human
impulse of tenderness, is generally quite un-
conscious of its lack. It may even be that the
reader's departure from the ordinary ranks of
mankind is still more fundamental, in which
case, instead of sitting in judgment on the ma-
jority, he would do well to read some such books
as those of Forel, Havelock Ellis, Bloch, or
Krafft-Ebing, in order that his own nature may
be made known to him. He may then discover
22 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
to which type of our widely various humanity
he belongs. He need not read my book, for it
is written about, and it is written for, ordinary
men and women, who feeling themselves incom-
plete, yearn for a union that will have power
not only to make a fuller and richer thing of
their own lives, but which will place them in a
position to use their sacred trust as creators
of lives to come. *.
It has happened many times in human history
that individuals have not only been able to.
conquer this natural craving for a mate, but
have set up celibacy as a higher ideal. In its
most beautiful expression and sublimest mani-
festations, the celibate ideal has proclaimed a
world-wide love, in place of the narrower human
love of home and children. Many saints and
sages, reformers, and dogmatists have modeled
their lives on this ideal. But such individuals
cannot be taken as the standard of the race, for
they are out of its main current: they are
branches which may flower, but never fruit in
a bodily form. . . -
In this world our spirits not only permeate
matter but find their only expression through
its medium. / So long as we are human we must
THE HEART'S DESIRE 23
have bodies, and bodies obey chemical and |-
physiological, as well as spiritual laws.
If our race as a whole set out to pursue an
ideal which must ultimately eliminate bodies
together, it is clear that very soon we should
find the conditions of our environment so
altered that we could no longer speak of the
human race.
In the meantime we are human. We each and
all live our lives according to laws, some of
which we have begun to understand, many of
which are completely hidden from us. The
most complete human being is he or she who
consciously or unconsciously obeys the pro-
found physical laws of our being in such a way
that the spirit receives much help and as little
hindrance from the body as possible. A mind
or spirit finds its fullest expression thwarted by
the misuse or the gross abuse of the body in
which it dwells. By the ignorant or self-in-
dulgent breaking of fundamental laws, the deep-
est harmonies are dislocated. The small-
minded ascetic endeavors to grow spiritually
by destroying his physical instincts instead of
by using them. ... -
But I would proclaim that we are set in the
world so to mold matter that it may express
24 LOVE IN MARBLAGE.
our spirit; that it is presumption to profess
to fight the immemorial laws of our physical
being, and that he who does so loses uncon-
sciously the finest flux in which wondrous new
creations take their rise.
To use a homely simile—one might compare
two human beings to two wires through which
pass electric currents. Isolated from each
other the electric forces pass uninterrupted
along their length, but if these wires come into
the right juxtaposition, the force is transmuted,
and a spark, a glow of burning light arises be
tween them. Such is love.
From the body of the loved one's simple,
sweetly colored flesh, which our animal instincts
urge us to desire, there springs not only the
wonder of a new bodily life, but also the en-
largement of the horizon of human sympathy
and the glow of spiritual understanding which
one could never have attained alone.
Many reading this may feel conscious that
they have had physical union without such
spiritual accompaniments, perhaps even with-
out an accession of ordinary pleasure. If that
is so, it can only be because, consciously or un-
consciously, they have broken some of the pro-
found laws which govern the love of man and
THE HEART'S DESIRE 25.
woman. Only by learning to hold a bow cor-
rectly can one draw music from a violin. Only
by obedience to the laws of the lower plane can
one step up to the plane above.
CHAPTER II
TELE BROKEN JOY
“What shall be done to quiet the heart-cry of the world?
How answer the dumb appeal for help we so often divine
below eyes that laugh?’”—A. E. in The Hero in Man.
DREAMING of happiness, feeling that at last
they have each found the one who will give
eternal understanding and tenderness, the
young man and maiden marry.
At first, in the time generally called the
honeymoon, the unaccustomed freedom and the
sweetness of the relation often do bring real
happiness. How long does it last? Generally,
a far shorter time than is generally acknowl-
edged. -
In the first joy of their union it is hidden
from the two young people that they know lit-
tle or nothing about the fundamental laws of
each other’s being. Much of the sex-attraction
(not only among human beings but throughout
the whole of the animal world) depends upon
the differences between the two that pair; an
- 26 $
THE BROKEN JOY 27
probably taking them all unawares, those very
differences which drew them together now be-
gin to work their undoing. But so long as the
first illusion that each understands the other
is supported by the thrilling delight of ever-
fresh discoveries, the sensations lived through
are so rapid, and so joyous that the lovers do
not realize that there is no firm foundation be-
neath their feet. While even in the happiest
cases there may be divergences about religion,
politics, social customs and opinions on things
in general, these, with good will, patience, and
intelligence on either side, can be ultimately
adjusted, because in all such things there is a
common meeting ground for the two. Human
beings, while differing widely about every con-
ceivable subject in these human relations, have
at least thought about them, threshed them out,
and discussed them openly for generations.
ſ. But about the much more fundamental and
vital problems of sex, there is a lack of knowl-
edge so abysmal and so universal that its mists
and shadowy darkness have affected even the
few who lead us, and who are prosecuting re-
search in these subjects. And the two young
*people begin to suffer from fundamental diver-
gences, before perhaps they realize that such
28 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
exist, and with little prospect of ever gaining
a rational explanation of them.
Nearly all those, whose own happiness seems
to be dimmed or broken, count themselves ex-
ceptions, and comfort themselves with the
thought of some of their friends, who they feel
sure have attained the happiness which they
themselves have missed.
It is generally supposed that happy people,
like happy nations, have no history—they are
silent about their own affairs. Those who talk
about their marriage are generally those who
have missed the happiness they expected. True
as this may be in general, it is not permanently
and profoundly true. There are people who
, are reckoned, and still reckon themselves, hap-
py, but who yet, unawares, reveal the secret
disappointment which clouds their inward
peace.
Leaving out of account “femmes incom-
prises” and all the innumerable cases of neu-
rotic, supersensitive, and slightly abnormal
people, it still remains an astonishing and
tragic fact that so large a proportion of normal
marriages lose their early bloom and are to
some extent unhappy.
For years many men and women have con-
f
THE BROKEN JOY 29
fided to me the secrets of their lives; and of
all the innumerable cases in which the circum-
stances are known to me, there are tragically
few marriages which approach even humanly
attainable joy.
Many of those considered by the world, by
the relatives, even by the loved and loving part-
ner, to be perfectly happy marriages, are se-
cret tragedies to the more sensitive of the pair.
Where the bride is, as are most of our edu-
cated girls, composed of virgin sweetness shut
in ignorance, the man is often the first to create
“the rift within the lute”: but his suffering
begins almost simultaneously with hers. Un-
conscious of the nature, and even perhaps of
the existence of his fault, he is bewildered and
pained by her inarticulate pain. It is my ex-
perience, that in the early days of marriage,
the young man is even more sensitive, more
romantic, more easily pained about all ordinary
things than the woman, that he enters marriage
hoping for an even higher degree of spiritual
and bodily unit than does the girl or the woman.
But the man is more quickly blunted, more
'swiftly rendered cynical, and is readier to look
upon happiness as a utopian dream than is his
mate.
!
30 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
On the other hand, the woman is slower to
realize disappointment, and more often is the
more profoundly wounded by the sex-life of
marriage, with a slow corrosive wound that eats
into her very being.
Perfect happiness is a unity composed of a
myriad essences: and this one supreme thing is
exposed to the attacks of countless destructive
factors. -
Were I to touch upon all the possible sources
of marital disappointment and unhappiness,
this book would expand into a dozen bulky
volumes. As I am addressing those who I as-
sume have read, or can read, other books writ-
ten upon various ramifications of the subject, I
will not discuss the themes which have been
handled by many writers. *
In the last few years there has been such an
awakening to the realization of the corrosive
horror of all aspects of prostitution, that there
is no need to elaborate the point that no mar-
riage can be happy where the husband has, in
buying another body, sold his own health, and
is tainted with disease.
Nor is it necessary, in speaking to well-mean-
ing optimistic young couples, to enlarge upon
THE BROKEN JOY 31
the obvious dangers of drunkenness, self-in-
dulgence, and the cruder forms of selfishness.
It is with the subtler infringements of the
fundamental laws we have to deal. And the
prime tragedy is that, as a rule, the two young
people are both unaware of the existence of
such decrees. Yet here, as elsewhere in na-
ture, the law-breaker is punished whether he
is aware of the existence of the law he breaks or
not.
In the state of ignorance which so largely
predominates to-day, the first sign that things
are amiss between the two who thought they
were entering paradise together, is generally
a sense of loneliness, a feeling that the one who
was expected to have all in common, is outside
some experience, some subtle delight, and fails
to understand the needs of the loved one. Triv-
ialities are often the first indicators of some-
thing which takes its roots unseen in the pro-
foundest depths of our natures. The girl may
sob for hours over something that at first ap-
pears so trifling that she cannot even tell a
friend about it, while the young man, who
thought that he had set out with his soul’s
beloved upon an adventure into celestial dis-
tances, may find himself apparently up against
32 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
some barrier in her which appears incompre-
hensible or frivolous.
Then, so strange is the mystical inter-relation
between our bodies, our minds, and our souls,
that for crimes committed in ignorance of the
dual functions of the married pair, and the laws
which harmonize them, the punishments are
reaped on plains quite diverse, till new and
ever new misunderstandings appear to spring
spontaneously from the soil of their mutual con-
tact. Gradually or swiftly each heart begins
to hide a sense of boundless isolation. It may
be urged that this statement is too sweeping.
It is, however, based on innumerable actual
cases. I have heard from women, whose mar-
riages are looked upon by all as the happiest
possible expressions of human felicity, the de-
tails of secret pain of which they have allowed
their husbands no inkling. Many men will
know how they have hidden from their beloved
wives a sense of dull disappointment, perhaps
at her coldness in the marital embrace, or from
the feeling that there is in her something elusive
which always evades their grasp.
Now that so many “movements” are abroad,
folk on all sides are emboldened to express the
opinion that it is marriage itself which is at
THE BROKEN JOY 33
fault. Many think that merely by loosening
the bonds, and making it possible to start afresh
with some one else, their lives would be made
harmonious and happy. By many such re-
formers it is forgotten that he or she who knows
nothing of the way to make marriage great
and beautiful with one partner, is not likely to
succeed with another. KOnly by a reverent
study of the Art of Love can the beauty of its
expression be realized in linked lives...}
And even when once learnt, the Art of Love
takes time to practice. As Ellen Key says,
“Love requires peace, love will dream; it can-
not live upon the remnants of our time and our
personality.”
There is no doubt that Love loses, in the haste
|
!
|
and bustle of our modern turmoil, not only
much of its charm and grace, but some of its
vital essence. The result of the haste which so
infests and poisons us, is often felt much more
by the woman than by the man. The over-
stimulation of city life tends to “speed up”
the man's reactions, but to retard hers. To
make matters worse, even for those who have
leisure to spend on love-making, the opportuni-
ties for peaceful, romantic dalliance are less
to-day in a city with its tubes and cinema shows
34 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
than in woods and gardens where the pulling
of rosemary or lavender may be the sweet ex-
cuse for the slow and profound mutual rousing
of passion. Now, physical passion, so swiftly
stimulated in man, tends to override all else,
and the untutored male sees but one thing—
the accomplishment of desire. The woman, for
it is in her nature so to do, forgives the crude-
ness, but sooner or later her love revolts, prob-
ably in secret, and then forever after, though
she may command an outward tenderness, she
has nothing within but scorn and loathing for
the act which should have been a perpetually
recurring entrancement.
So many people are now born and bred in
artificial and false surroundings, that even the
elementary fact that the acts of love should be
joyous is unknown to them. Havelock Ellis
(“Psychology of Sex,” vol 6, 1913, p. 512)
quotes the amazing statement of a distinguished
American gynecologist, who said, “I do not be-
lieve mutual pleasure in the sexual act has any
particular bearing on the happiness of life.”
This is, perhaps, an extreme case, yet so many
distinguished medical men, gynecologists and
physiologists, are either in ignorance or error
regarding some of the profoundest facts of hu-
THE BROKEN JOY 35
man sex-life, that it is not surprising that ordi-
nary young couples, however hopeful, should
break and destroy the joy that might have been
their lifelong companion.
CHAPTER III
woman’s “costuminess”
*Oh! for that Being whom I ean eoneeive to be in the
world, though I shall net live to prove it. One to whom
I might have recourse in all my Humours and Dispositions: in .
all my Distempers of Mind, visionary Causes of Mortifiea.
tion, and Fairy Dreams of Pleasure. I have been trying to
train up a Lady or two for these good offices of Friendship,
but hitherto I must not boast of my success.”—HERRICK.
WHAT is the fate of the average man who
marries, happily and hopefully, a girl well
suited to him? He desires with his whole heart
a mutual, lifelong happiness. He marries
with the intention of fulfilling every injunction
given him by father, doctor and friend. He
is considerate in trifles, he speaks no harsh
words, he and his bride go about together, walk
together, read together, and perhaps, if they
are very, advanced, even work together. But
after a few months, or maybe a few years, of
marriage they seem to have drifted apart, and
he finds her often cold and incomprehensible.
If he is a nice man, he will not acknowledge
36
WOMAN’S “CONTRARINESS’’ 37
this even to his best friend. But his heart
knows its own pain.
He may at times laugh, and in the friendliest
spirit tease her about her contrariness. That
is taken by every one to mean nothing but a
playful concealment of his profound love.
Probably it is. But gnawing at the very roots
of his love is a hateful little worm—the sense
that she is contrary. He feels that she is at
times inexplicably cold: that, sometimes, when
he has “done nothing” she will have tears in
her eyes, irrational tears which she cannot ex-
plain.
He observes that one week his tender love.
making and romantic advances win her to smiles
and joyous yielding, and then perhaps a few
days later the same, or more impassioned, ten-
derness on his part is met by coldness or a
forced appearance of warmth, which, while he
may make no comment upon it, hurts him
acutely. And this deep, inexplicable hurt is
often the beginning of the end of love. Men
like to feel that they understand their beloved,
and that she is a rational being. *
After this has continued for some time, if
the man is of at all a jealous nature, he will
search among his wife's acquaintances for
38 LOVE IN MAERLAGE
some one whom she may have met, for some
one who may momentarily have diverted her
attention. For the natural man at once seeks
the explanation of his own ill-success in a rival.
On some occasion when her coldness puzzles
him he is conscious that his love, his own de-
sires, are as ardent as they were a few days
before. Knowing so intimately his own heart,
he is sure of the steadiness of its love, and he
feels acutely the romantic passion to which her
beauty stirs him. He remembers perhaps that
a few days earlier his ardor had awakened a
response in her. Therefore he reaches what
appears to him to be the infallible logical de-
duction: that either there must be some rival—
or his bride's nature is incomprehensible, con-
trary, capricious. Both—thoughts to madden.
With capriciousness, man in general has lit-
tle patience. Caprice renders his best efforts
null and void. Woman’s caprice is, or appears
to be, a negation of reason. And as reason is
man's most precious and hard-won faculty, the
one which has raised mankind from the ranks
of brute creation, he cannot bear to see it a
parently flouted. -
That his bride should lack logic and sweet
reasonableness—is a flaw it hurts him to recog-
WOMAN'S “CONTRARINESS” 39.
nize in her. He has to crush the thought down.
It may then happen that the young man, him-
self pained and bewildered at having pained
his bride by the very ardor of his affection,
may strive to please her by placing restraint
upon himself. He may ask himself: Do not
books on sex preach restraint to the man? He
reads the books written for the guidance of
youth, and finds “restraint,” “self-control,”
generally, and often irrationally, urged in them
all. His next step may then be to curtail the
expression of his tender feelings, and to work
hard and late in the evenings instead of kissing
his bride's fingers and playing with the lace of
her dress.
And then, if he is at all observant, he may be
aggrieved and astonished to find her again
wistful or hurt. With the tender longing to
understand, which is so profound a characteris-
tic in all the best of our young men, he begs,
implores, or pets her into telling him some part
of the reason for her fresh grievance. He dis-
covers to his amazement that this time she is
hurt because he had not made those very ad-
vances which so recently had repelled her, and
had been with such difficulty repressed by his
intellectual efforts.
40 LOVE IN MARBLAGE
He asks himself in despair: What is a man
to do? If he is intelligent, he probably devours
all the books on sex he can obtain. But in
them he is not likely to find much real guidance.
He learns from them that “restraint” is ad- .
vised by practically every author, but accord-
ing to the character pf the author he will find
that “restraint” means having the marriage
relation with his wife not more than three
times a week, or once a month—or never at all
exeept for the protection of children. He finds
no rational guidance based on natural law.
According to his temperament then, he may
begin to practice “restraint.”
But it may happen, and indeed it has prob-
ably happened in every marriage once or many
times, that the night comes when the man who
has heroically practiced restraint, accidentally
discovers his wife's tears on her solitary pil-
low. w *
He seeks for advice indirectly from his
friends, perhaps from his doctor. But can his
local doctor or his friends tell him more than
the chief European authorities on this subject?
In Forel’s “The Sexual Question,” he reads
the following advice: “The reformer, Luther,
who was a practical man, laid down the average
WOMAN'S “CONTRARINESS” 41
rule of two or three connections a week in mar-
riage, at the time of highest sexual power. I
may say that my numerous observations as a
physician have generally confirmed this rule,
which seems to me to conform very well to the
normal state to which man" has become grad-
ually adapted during thousands of years. Hus-
bands who would consider this average as an
imprescriptible right would, however, make
wrong pretensions, for it is quite possible for a
normal man to contain himself much longer,
and it is his duty to do so, not only when his
wife is ill, but also during menstruation and
pregnancy.”
Many men will not be so considerate as to fol-
low this advice, which represents a high stand-
ard of living; but on the other hand there are
many who are willing to go not only so far, but
further than this in their self-suppression in
order to attain their heart’s desire, the happi-
ness of their mate, and consequently their own
life's joy.
However willing they may be to go further,
the great question for the man is: How far?
*The italies are mine—M. C. S. This prenouncement of an
advaneed and broad-minded thinker serves to show
exeeptionally
how little attention has hitherto been paid to the woman's side
of this question, or to ascertaining her natural requirements.
42 LOVE IN MARBLAGE
There are innumerable leaders anxious to
lead in many different directions. The young
husband may try first one and then the other,
and still find his wife unsatisfied, incomprehen-
sible—capricious. Then it may be that, dis-
heartened, he gets tired and she sinks into the
dull apathy of acquiescence in her “wifely
duty.” He is left with an echo of resentment
in his heart: if only she had not been so capri-
cious, they would still have been happy, he
fancies.
Many writers, novelists, poets, and drama-
tists, have represented the uttermost tragedy
of human life as due to the incomprehensible
contrariness of the feminine nature. The kind-
ly ones smile, perhaps a little patronizingly,
and tell us that women are more instinctive,
more child-like, less reasonable than men. The
bitter ones sneer or reproach or laugh at this
“contrariness” in woman that they do not un-
derstand, and which, baffling their intellect, ap-
pears to them to be irrational folly. -
It seems strange that those who search for
natural law in every domain of the universe,
should have so neglected the most vital subject,
the one which concerns us all infinitely more
than the naming of planets or the collecting of
WOMAN'S “CONTRARINESS” 43
insects. Woman is not essentially capricious.
Some of the laws of her being might have been
discovered long ago had the existence of law
been suspected. But it has been easier, has
suited the general structure of society much
better, for men to shrug their shoulders and
smile at women as irrational and capricious
creatures.
Vaguely, perhaps, men have realized that
much of the charm of life lies in the sea-dif-
ferences between men and women; so they have
snat led at the easy theory that women differ
from themselves, by being capricious. More-
over, by attributing to mere caprice the cold-
ness which at times comes over the most ardent
woman, man was unconsciously justifying him-
self by coercing her to suit himself.
Conditions have been såch that hitherto the
explorers and scientific investigators, the his-
torians and statisticians, the poets and artists
have been mainly men. Consequently woman's
side of the sexual life has found little or no
expression. Woman has been content to mold
herself to the shape desired by man wherever
possible, and she has stifled her natural feel-
ings and her own deep thoughts as they welled
up. y -
44 LOVE IN MARBLAGE
Most women have never realized intellect-
ually, but many have been dimly half-conscious,
that woman's nature is set to rhythms over
which man has almost no more control than he
has over the tides of the sea. While the ocean
can subdue and dominate man and laugh at his
attempted restrictions, woman has bowed to
man's desire over her body, and, regardless of
its pulses, he approaches her or not as is his
will. Some of her rhythms defy him—the moon-
month tide of menstruation, the cycle of ten
moon-months of bearing the growing child and
its birth at the end of the tenth wave—these
are essentials too strong to be mastered by
man. But the subtler ebb and flow of woman’s
\sea has escaped man's observation or his care.
If a swimmer comes to a sandy beach when
the tide is out, and the waves have receded,
leaving sand where he had expected deep blue
water—does he, balked of his bath, angrily call
the sea “capricious”? . . .
But the tenderest bridegroom finds onl
caprice in his bride's coldness when she yields
her sacrificial body while her sex-tide is at the
ebb.
There is another side to this problem, one
woMAN’s “CONTRARINEss” 45
perhaps even less considered by society. There
is the case of the loving woman whose love-tide
is at the highest and whose husband does not
recognize the signs of her ardor. In our anae-
mic artificial days it often happens that the
man's desire is a surface need, quickly satis-
fied, colorless and lacking beauty, and that he
has no knowledge of the rich complexities of
love-making which an initiate of love's mys-
teries enjoys. To such a man his wife may in-
deed seem petulant, capricious, or resentful
without reason. -
Welling up in her are the wonderful tides,
scented and enriched by the myriad experiences
of the human race from its ancient days of
leisure and flower-wreathed love-making, urg-
ing her to transports and to self-expressions,
were the man but ready to take the first step
in the initiative, or to recognize and welcome it
in her. Seldom dare any woman, still more
seldom dare a wife, risk the blow at her heart .
which would be given were she to offer charm-
ing love-play to which the man did not respond.
To the initiate she will be able to reveal that
the tide is up by a hundred subtle signs, upon
which he will seize with delight. But if her
husband is blind to them, there is for her noth-
46 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
ing but silence, self-suppression, and their in-
evitable sequence of self-scorn followed by 're-
sentment towards the man who places her in
such a position while talking of his “love.”
So little of the ekements of the Art of Love
do many men know that the case of Mrs. G. is
certainly not exceptional. Her husband was
accustomed to pet her and to have relations
with her frequently, but yet he never took any
trouble to rouse her sex-feelings. She had mar-
ried as a very innocent girl, but often vaguely
felt a sense of something lacking in her hus-
Nº 's love. Her husband had never kissed
i her except on the lips or cheeks, but once at
: the crest of the wave of her sex-tide (all un-
; conscious that it was so) she felt a yearning to
feel his head, his lips, pressed against her
bosom. The sensitive interrelation between a
i woman's breasts and the rest of her sex-life
is a well-established fact, and there is a world
, of poetic beauty in the longing of a loving
; woman for the unconceived child, which melts
in mists of tenderness toward her lover, the
soft touch of whose lips can thus rouse her
mingled joy. Because she shyly asked him,
Mrs. G.'s husband impressed one short kiss on
her bosom, and never repeated it. He was so
WOMAN’S “CONTRARINESS’’ 47
ignorant that he did not know that the kissing A.
and the tender fondling with his lips of a
woman's breasts is one of the first and surest
ways to make her ready for complete and satis-
factory union. In this way he inhibited her hat-
ural desire, and as he never did anything to
stir it, she never had any physical pleasure in
their relation. Such prudish or careless hus-
bands, content with their own satisfaction, lit-
tle know the pent-up aching, or even resent-
ment, which may eat into their wife's joy."
In many cases, however, the man is also the
victim of the social customs which make sex-
knowledge for women taboo. -
It has become a tradition of our social life
that the ignorance of woman about her own
body and that of her future husband is a flower-
like innocence. And to such an extreme is this
sometimes pushed, that not seldom is a girl
married unaware that married life will bring
her into physical relations with her husband,
fundamentally different from those with her
brother.” When she discovers the true nature
*To * * men and women about town, this statement
may appear ridieulous, fantastic or exaggerated. But it rep-
resents a true state of affairs. Girls who get married in
eomplete ignorance of what the marriage relation implies still
exist to-day, in the year 1918—W. J. B. -
48 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
of his body, and learns the part she has to play
as a wife, she may refuse utterly to agree to
her husband's wishes. I know a case in which
the husband, chivalrous and loving, had to wait
years before his bride recovered from the shock
of the discovery of the meaning of marriage,
and was able to allow him a natural relation.
There are known not a few cases in which the
horror of the first night of marriage with a
man less considerate, has driven the bride to
suicide or insanity. *.
That girls can reach a marriageable age with-
out some knowledge of the realities of sex would
seem incredible; but it is a fact. One highly
educated lady whom I know intimately told
me that when she was about eighteen she suf-
fered many months of agonizing apprehension
that she was about to have a baby, because a
man had snatched a kiss from her lips at a
dance.
When girls.so brought up are married, it is
ſrape for the husband to insist on his “marital
rights” at once. It will be difficult or impos-
Vºl. for such a bride ever after to experience
the joys of sex-union, for such a beginning
must imprint upon her consciousness the view
that the man's animal nature dominates him.
WOMAN'S “CONTRARINESS” , 49
In a magazine I came across a poem which
vividly expresses this peculiarly feminine sor-
TOW 2 /
“. . . . To mate with men who have no soul about
Earth grubbing; who, the bridal night, forsooth,
Killed sparks that rise from instinct fires of life, -
And left us frozen things, alone to fashion
Our souls to dust, masked with the name of wife—
Long years of youth—love years—the years of pas-,
sion
Yawning before us. So, shamming to the end,
All shriveled by the side of him we wed,
Hoping that peace may riper years attend,
Mere odalisques are we—well housed, well fed.”
KATHERINE NELSON.
Many men who enter marriage sincerely and
tenderly, may yet have some previous experi-
ence of bought “love.” It is then not unlikely
that they may fall into the error of explaining
their wife's experiences in terms of the reac-
tions of the prostitute. They argue that, be-
cause the prostitute showed physical excitement,
and pleasure in the sexual act, if the bride or
wife does not do so, then she is “cold” or “un-
dersexed.” They may not realize that often alſ
the bodily movements of the prostitute are
studied and simulated because her client enjoys
50 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
his orgasm best when he imagines that the
woman in his arms has one simultaneously.
As Forel says: “The company of prostitutes
often renders men incapable of understanding
feminine psychology, for prostitutes are hard-
ly more than automata trained for the use of
male sensuality. When men look among these
for the sexual psychology of woman they find
only their own mirror.”
Fate is often cruel to men too. It may be
that after years of fighting with his hot young
blood a man has given up, and gone now and
then for relief to prostitutes, and then later in
life has met the woman who is his mate, and
whom, after remorse for his soiled past, he
marries. Then, unwittingly, he may make the
wife suffer either by interpreting her in the
light of the other women, or perhaps (though
this happens less frequently) by setting her
absolutely apart from them. I know of a man
who, after a loose life, met a woman whom he
reverenced and adored. He married her, but
to preserve her “purity,” her difference from
the others, he never had sexual relations with
her.” She was strangely unhappy, for she
"Such cases while rare are not altogether mythical, but
the eause is generally to be found elsewhere. In some qases
WOMAN’S “CONTRARINESS’’ 51
loved him passionately and longed for children.
She appeared to him to be pining “capricious-
ly” when she became thin and neurotic.
Perhaps if this man had known that some
female animals suffer severely and may even
die if denied sexual union,” he might have seen
his own behavior in a truer light. -
The idea that woman is lowered or “soiled”
by sexual intercourse is still deeply rooted in
some strata of our society. Many sources have
contributed to this mistaken idea, not the least
powerful being the ascetic ideal of the early
church, and the fact that man has used woman
as his instrument so often regardless of her
wishes. Woman’s education and the trend of
social feeling have largely been in the direc-.
tion of encouraging the idea that sex-life is a
low, physical and degrading necessity which a
pure woman should be above enjoying. .
In marriage the husband has used his “mari-
the abstinence is due to nothing more nor less than aequired
impotence, the man's inability to perform the act. In other
cases the reason may be found in a previous venereal disease
and the man’s consequent fear to infect his wife. Conseiously
or unconsciously the man makes a virtue eut of necessity.
—W. J. R.
*See Marshall, Quarterly Journal Microscopic Science, Wol.
48, 1904, p. 323. -
52 LovE IN MARRIAGE
tal right”" of intercourse when he wished it.
Both law and custom have strengthened the
view that he has the right to approach his wife
whenever he wishes, and that she has no wishes
and no fundamental needs in the matter at all.
. That woman has a rhythmic sex-tide which
if its seasons were obeyed would ensure not
only her enjoyment, but would explode the myth
of her capriciousness, seems not to be sus-
ected. We have studied the wave-lengths of
water, of sound, of light: but when will the
sons and daughters of men study the sex-tide
woman and learn the laws of her Periodicity
of Recurrence of Desire? -
*“Conjugal Rights.” Notes and Queries. May 16th 1891,
p. 383. “S. writes from the Probate Registry, Somerset
House: “Previous to 1733 legal proceedings were recorded
in Latin and the word then used where we now speak of
rights was obsequies. For some time after the substitution of
English for Latin, the term rites was usually, if not invariably,
adopted; rights would appear to be a comparatively medera
error.” y y
“Mr. T. E. Paget writes . . . "Romeo and Juliet,” Aet W.
Seene III: -
What eursed foot wanders this way to-night
Te cross my obsequies, and true lovers’ riteſ
Well may Lord Esher say he has never been able to make out
what the phrase “eonjugal rights’ means. The origin of the
term is now clear, and a blunder which was first made perhaps
by a type-setter in the early part of the last eentury, and
never exposed until now, has led to a vast amount of misap-
prehension. Here, too, is another proof that Shakespeare was
exceedingly familiar with ‘legal language.’”
CHAPTER IV
TELE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE,
“The judgments of men concerning women are very rarely
matters of cold scientific observation, but are eoloured both
by their own sexual emotions and by their own moral attitude
teward the sexual impulse . . . [Men’s]. Statements about
the sexual impulses ef women often tell us less about women
than about the persons who make them.”—B. ELLs.
By the majority of “nice” people woman is
supposed to have no spontaneous sex impulses.
By this I do not mean a sentimental “falling in
love,” but a physical, a physiological state of
stimulation which arises spontaneously and
quite apart from any particular man. It is in
truth the creative impulse, and is an expression
of a high power of vitality. So widespread in
Anglo-Saxon countries is the view that it is only
depraved women who have such feelings (es-
pecially before marriage) that most women
would rather die than acknowledge that they
do at times feel a physical yearning indescrib-
able, but as profound as hunger for food. Yet
many, many women have shown me the truth of
53
54 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
their natures when I have simply and naturally
assumed that of course they felt it—being nor-
mal women—and have asked them only: When?
From their replies I have collected facts which
are sufficient to overturn many ready-made
theories about women.
Some of the ridiculous absurdities which go
by the name of science may be illustrated by
the statement made by Windscheid in the Cen-
tralblatt für Gynākologie: “In the normal
woman, especially of the higher social classes,
the sexual instinct is acquired, not inborn; when
it is inborn, or awakens by itself, there is ab-
normality. Since women do not know this in-
stinct before marriage, they do not miss it when
they have no occasion in life to learn it.” (El-
lis’ translation.)
The negation of this view is expressed in the
fable of Hera quoted by Ellen Key. Hera sent
Iris to earth to seek out three virtuous and
perfectly chaste maidens who were unsoiled by
any dreams of love. Iris found them, but could
not take them back to Olympus for they had
already been sent for to replace the superan-
nuated Furies in the infernal regions.
Nevertheless it is true that the whole educa-
tion of girls, which so largely consists in the
TEIE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE' 55
concealment of the essential facts of life from
them; and the positive teaching so prevalent
that the racial instincts are low and shameful;
and also the social condition which places so
many women in the position of depending on
their husband's will not only for the luxuries
but for the necessities of life, have all tended
to inhibit natural sex-impulses in women, and
to conceal and distort what remains.
It is also true that in our northern climate
women are on the whole naturally less persist-
ently stirred than southerners; and it is further
true that with the delaying of maturity, due to
our ever-lengthening youth, it often happens
that a woman is approaching or even past thirty
before she is awake to the existence in her of
the sex-urge. For many years before that, how-
ever, the unrealized influence, diffused through-
out her very system, has profoundly affected
her. It is also true that(partly due to the inhibit-
ing influences of our customs, traditions and so-
cial code) women may marry before it wakes,
and may remain long after marriage entirely
uñconscious that it exists subdued within them.
For innumerable women too, the husband's reg-
ular habits of intercourse, claiming her both
when she would naturally enjoy union and when
56 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
/
it is to some degree repugnant to her, have
tended to flatten out the billowing curves of the
line of her natural desire. One result, appar-
ently little suspected, of using the woman as a
passive instrument for man's need has been, in
effect, to make her that and nothing more.
Those men—and there are many—who complain
of the lack of ardor in good wives, are often
themselves entirely to blame for it. When a
woman is claimed at times when she takes no
natural pleasure in union, it reduces her vital-
ity, and tends to kill her power of enjoying it
when the love season returns.
It is certainly true of women as they have
been made by the inhibitions of modern civili-
zation, that most of them are only fully awake
to the existence of sex after marriage. As
we are civilized human beings, the social, in-
tellectual, spiritual side of the love-choice have
tended to mask the basic physiological aspect
of women’s sex-life. To find a woman in whom
the currents are not all so entangled that the
whole is inseparable into factors, is not easy,
but I have found that wives (particularly happy
wives whose feelings are not complicated by the
stimulus of another love) who have been sepa-
rated from their husbands for some months
THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 57
through professional or business duties—whose
husbands, for instance, are abroad—are the
women from whom the best and most definite
(ºr: of a fundamental rhythm of feeling
can be obtained. Such women, yearning daily
for the tender comradeship and nearness of
their husbands, find in addition, at particular
times, an accession of longing for the close
physical union of the final sex-act. Many such
separated wives feel this, and those I have
asked to keep notes of the dates, have, with re-
markable unanimity, told me that these times
came specially just before and a week or so
after the close of menstruation, coming, that
is, about every fortnight. It is from such women.
that I got the first clew to the knowledge of
. I call the Law of Periodicity of Recur-
ence of desire in women.
This law it is possible to represent graphi-
cally as a curved line; a succession of crests and
hollows as in all wave-lines. Its simplest and
most fundamental expression, however, is gen-
erally immensely complicated by other stimula-
'tions which may bring into it diverse series of
waves, or irregular wave-crests. We have all,
at some time, watched the regular ripples of the
sea breaking against a sand-bank, and noticed
58 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
that the influx of another current of water may
send a second system of waves at right angles
to the first, cutting athwart them, so that the
two series of waves pass through each other.
Woman is so sensitive and responsive an in-
strument, and is so liable in our modern civil-
ized world to be influenced by innumerable sets
of stimuli, that it is perhaps scarcely surpris-
-ing that the deep, underlying waves of her prim-
itive sex-tides have been obscured, and en-
tangled so that their regular sequence has been
masked in the choppy turmoil of her sea, and
their existence has been largely unsuspected,
d apparently quite unstudied.
JFor some years I have been making as scien-
tific and detailed a study as possible of this ex-
tremely complex problem. Owing to the frank
d scientific attitude of a number of women,
and the ready and intimate confidence of many
more, I have obtained a number of most inter-
esting facts from which I think it is already pos-
sible to deduce a generalization which is illu-
minating, and may be of great medical and so-
ciological value.
It is first necessary to consider several other
features of woman’s life, however.
The obvious moon-month rhythm in woman,
;
}
THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE. 5s
so obvious that it cannot be overlooked, has
been partially studied in its relation to some of
the ordinary functions of her life. Experiments
have been made to show its influence on the rate
of breathing, the muscular strength, the tem-
perature, the keenness of sight, etc., and these
results have even been brought together and
pictured in a single curved diagram supposed
to show the variability in woman's capacities
at the different times in her twenty-eight-day
cycle.
But it brings home to one how little original
work even in this field has yet been done, that
the same identical diagram is repeated from
book to book, and in Marshall’s “Physiology” it
is “taken from Sellheim,” in Havelock Ellis
“from Van Ott,” and in other books is re-copied
and attributed to still other sources.
This diagram appears to be the only one of
its kind, and is reproduced by one learned au-
thority after another, yet nearly every point on
which this curve is based appears to have been
disputed. t
According to this curve, woman’s vitality
rises during the few days before menstruation, N
sinks to its lowest ebb during menstruation an
rises shortly after, and then runs nearly level
60 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
till it begins to rise again before the next men-
strual period. This simple curve may or may
not be true for woman's temperature, muscular
strength, and the 'other relatively simple things
which have been investigated. My work, and
observations on a large number of women, all
go to show that this curve does not represen
the waves of woman's sex-tides. -
The whole subject is so complex and so little
studied that it is difficult to enter upon it at
all without going into many details which may
seem remote or dull to the general reader.
Even a question which we must all have asked,
and over which we have probably pondered in
vain, namely: What is menstruation? camot
yet be answered. To the lay mind it would
seem that this question should be answerable
at once by any doctor; but many medical men
are still far from being able to reply to it even
approximately correctly.
There are a good many shight variations
among us, ranging from a three to a five week
“month,” but the majority of the women of our
race have a moon-month of twenty-eight days,
once during which comes the flow of menstrua-
tion. If we draw out a chart with succeeding
periods of 28 days each, looking on each period
THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 61
as a unit: When in this period is it that a
normal healthy woman feels desire, or any up-
welling of her sex-tides?
The few statements which are made in gen-
eral medical and physiological literature on the
subject of sex feeling in women, are generally
very guarded and vague. Marshall (“Physiol-
ogy of Reproduction,” p. 138) for instance,
says: “The period of most acute sexual feeling
is generally just after the close of the menstrual
period.” Ellis speaks of desire being stronger
before and sometimes also after menstruation,
and appears to lean to the view that it is natural
for desire to coincide with the menstrual flow.
After the most careful inquiries I have come
to the conclusion that the general confusion re-
garding this subject is due partly to the great
amount of variation which exists between dif-
ferent individuals, and partly to the fact that
very few women have any idea of taking any
scientific interest in life, and partly to the fact
that the more profound, fundamental rhythm
of sex desire which I have come to the conclu-
sion exists or is potential in every normal
woman, is covered over or masked by the more
superficial and temporary influences due to a
great variety of stimuli or inhibitions in mod-
62 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
Kern life. For the present consideration I have
tried to disentangle the profound and natural
rhythm from the more irregular surface waves.
Chart No. I may assist in making graphically
clear what has been said in these last few pages.
It is compounded from a number of individual
records, and shows a fair average chart of the
rhythmic sequence of superabundance and flag-
ging in woman's sex-vitality. The tops of the
wave-crests come with remarkable regularity
so that there are two wave-crests in each
twenty-eight day month. The one comes on
the two or three days just before menstruation:
the other after; but after menstruation has
ceased there is a nearly level interval, bringing
the next wave-crest to the two or three days
which come about eight or nine days after the
close of menstruation, that is, just round the
fourteen days, or half the moon month, since the
last wave-crest. If this is put in its simplest
way, one may say that there are fortnightly pe-
riods of desire, arranged so that one period
comes always just before each menstrual flow.
Upon her vitality at the time, and the general
health of the woman, the length of each desire-
period, or, as we might say, the size and com-
plexity of each wave-crest, depends. Sometimes
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THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 65
for the whole of as many as, or even more than,
three days she may be ardently and quite nat-
urally stimulated, while at another time the
same woman, if she is tired or overworked, may
be conscious of desire for only a few hours, or
even less. -
The effects of fatigue, city-life, bad feeding
and indeed of most outward circumstances may
be very marked, and may for years, or all her
life, so reduce her vitality that a woman may
never have experienced any spontaneous sex-
impulse at all. *
The effects of fatigue, which reduces the vital
energy, even in a normal, strongly sexed
woman, can be seen on chart II, where at a
the intermediate wave-crest is very much re-
duced. This is not a generalized chart, but a
detailed record of an actual individual case.
Curves similar to those shown on charts I
and II represent in general terms a simplified
view of what my research leads me to believe
to be the normal, spontaneous sex-tide in women
of our race. As one young married woman
confided to me, her longing for bodily union
with her husband, as distinct from her longing
for his daily companionship, seemed to well up
naturally “like clock-work,” and this when he
66 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
had been long away from her. But human .
beings vary remarkably in every particular, and
just as no two people have the same features,
so no two people would have absolutely identi-
cal curves were they recorded in sufficient de-
tail. Many a woman is particularly conscious
of only one period in each moon-month. Of such
women, some feel the period which comes before
menstruation, and some feel the one which fol-
lows it. In those who generally feel only one, the
second period is sometimes felt when they are
particularly well, or only when they read excit-
ing novels, or meet the man they love at a time
coinciding with the natural but suppressed time
of desire. There are a few women, who seem
to be really a little abnormal, who feel the
strongest desire actually during the menstrual
flow. [There is no justification for applying
the term abnormal to those women whose sex-
urge is most intense during the menstrual
period. The number of such women is larger
than is generally assumed. W. J. R.]
If any one who reads this thinks to test my
view by questioning a number of women, the
result will probably appear very conflicting,
partly because it is not often that women will
tell the truth about such a thing, and partly be-
THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 67
cause in the larger number of women either one
or the other period is the more acute and is the
one they observe in themselves—if they have
observed anything. But a delicate and more
accurate investigation of such cases will often
bring to light the existence of the second crest
of sex desire. Once the fundamental idea is
grasped, much that appeared obscure or of no
significance becomes plain and full of meaning.
One lady doctor with whom I discussed my view
at oncé said that it illuminated many observa-
tions she had made on her patients, but had
not brought together or explained.
There is but little evidence to be found in
scientific works on sex, but an interesting in-
stance is mentioned by Forel, “The Sexual
Question,” in another connection. He says: “A
married woman confessed to me, when I re-
proached her for being unfaithful to her hus-
band, that she desired coitus at least, once a
fortnight, and that when her husband was not
there, she took the first comer.” We may per-
haps all see in her want of self-control a
grievous moral delinquency, but in her fort-
nightly periods of desire she fits perfectly into
the law which, it appears to me, governs the
normal sex-tides of the female of our species.
68. LOVE IN MARRIAGE
In this connection it is of interest to note the
decrees of the Mosaic Law regarding marital
intercourse. Not only was all intercourse with
a woman during her menstruation period very
heavily punished (see Leviticus XX, 18: “If
a man lie with a woman having her sickness
. . . both of them shall be cut off from among
their people”): but the Mosaic Law provided
that women should be protected from inter-
course for some days after each period. The
results obtained by my independent investiga-
tion thus find some support in this ancient wis-
dom of the East. Modern writers are inclined
to deride the Mosaic Law on the ground that it
prohibits intercourse just at the time when
they think sex-feeling should be strongest. But
it does not appear on what grounds they make
the latter statement, nor do they give any
scientific data in support of it. Thus Galabin
in his “Manual of Midwifery” says: “In the
Jewish law women are directed to abstain” from
coitus during menstruation, and for seven days
after its cessation. Strict observers of the law
are said to go beyond what is commanded in
(*In Levitieus XV, it is the man who is directed to abstain
from touching the woman at this period, and who is rendered
unclean if he does.) -
THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE - 69
Leviticus and even if the discharge lasts only
for an hour or two, to observe five days during
which the discharge might last, for the period
itself, and add to these seven clear days, mak-
ing twelve in all. . . . It is much to be doubted
whether . . . a whole nation was ever induced
to practice abstinence at the period of most
acute sexual feeling.” But as will readily be
recognized, the old Jewish plan of having
twelve clear days after the beginning of men-
struation before the next union, is in almost
exact harmony with the Law of Periodicity of
Recurrence of desire in woman as shown in my
charts. t
These comparatively simple curves represent
what I would postulate as the normal spon-
taneous up-welling of natural desire in woman.
. These are the foundations on which the edifice
of the physical expression of love may be built.
It must not be forgotten, however, that, partic-
ularly in modern luxurious life, there are in-
numerable excitements which may stimulate
sexual feeling, just as there are many factors,
in our life which tend to inhibit or retard it.
A woman may be, like a man, so swayed by a
great love that there is not a day in the whole
month when her lover's touch, his voice, the
}
70 LOVE IN' MARBLAGE
memory of his smile, does not stir her into the
thrilling longing for the uttermost union.
Hence it is often difficult, particularly for a
; woman dwelling with the man she loves, to rec-
ognize this rhythm in herself, for she may be
perpetually stimulated by her love and by his
being. I am convinced, however, that ordinar-
ily, whether she recognizes it by outward signs
or not, it profoundly influences the woman and
hence that it fundamentally affects the marriage
relation in every way. The burning magnifi-
cence of an overpowering lifelong love is not
given to many, and a husband who desires last-
ing and mutual happiness in his marriage, will
carefully study his wife, observe how far she
has a normal rhythm, and in what respects she
possesses peculiar personal traits. He will
then endeavor to adapt his demands on her so
that they are in harmony with her nature.
This mutual adaptation is not an entirely
simple matter, and will be considered in the next.
chapter.
CHAPTER V
MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT
“Love worketh no ill to his neighbor.”
—ST. PAUL.
IN the average man of our race desire knows
no seasons beyond the slight slackening of the
winter months and the heightening of spring
and summer. Some men have observed in
themselves a faintly-marked monthly rhythm,
but in the majority of men desire, even if held
in stern check, is merely slumbering. It is
always present, ever ready to wake at the light-
est call, and often so spontaneously insistent
as to require perpetual conscious repression.
It would go ill with the men of our race had
women retained the wild animals' infrequent
seasonal rhythm and with it her inviolable
rights in her own body. Woman, too, has ac-
quired a much more frequent rhythm; but, as
it does not equal man’s, he has tended to ignore
and override it, coercing her at all times and
71
*
72 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
seasons, either by force, or by the even more
compelling power of “divine” authority and
social tradition.
If man's desire is perpetual and woman’s
intermittent, if man's desire naturally wells up
every day or every few days and woman's only
every fortnight or every month, it may appear
at first sight impossible for the unwarped needs
of both natures to be mutually satisfied.
The sense that a satisfactory mutual adjust-
ment is not within the realms of possibility
has, indeed, obsessed our race for centuries.
The result has been that the supposed need of
one of the partners has tended to become para-
mount, and we have established the social tradi-
tions of a husband’s “rights” and wifely
“duty.” As one man quite frankly said to me:
“As things are it is impossible for both sexes
to get what they want. One must be sacrificed.
And it is better for society that it should be
the woman.” -
Nevertheless, the men who consciously sacri-
fice the women are in a minority. Most men
act in ignorance. Our code, however, has blind-
ly sacrificed not only the woman, but with her
the happiness of the majority of men, who, in
total ignorance of its meaning and results, have
MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 73
grown up thinking that women should submit
to regularly frequent, or even nightly, inter-
course. For the sake of a few moments of phys-
ical pleasure they lose realms of ever-expand-
ing joy and tenderness; and while men and
women may not realize the existence of an un-
trodden paradise, they both suffer, if only half
consciously, from being shut out from it.
Before making some suggestions which may
help married people to find not only a via media
of mutual endurance, but a via perfecta of mu
tual joy, it is necessary to consider a few points
about the actual nature of man’s “desire.” In
the innumerable books addressed to the young
which I have read, I have not found one which
gives certain points regarding the meaning of
the male sex-phenomena which must be grasped
before it is possible to give rational guidan
to intelligent young men. -
he general physiology of our body is given
to us in youth and in a clean scientific way.
But the physiology of our most profoundly dis-
turbing functions is ignored—in my opinion
| criminally ignored.
Every mating man and woman should know
at least the essential facts: -
The sex organs of a man consist not only of
74 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
*
j
the testicles which give rise to the living, mov-
ing, ciliated cells, the spermatozoa, and of the
channel or tube in the center of the penis
through which they pass and by means of which
they are directed into the proper place for their
deposition, the woman's vagina. Associated
with these primary and essential structures
there are other tissues and glands which play
subsidiary but yet very important parts. Man's
penis, when quiet and, unstimulated, is soft,
small and drooping. /ºut when stimulated,
either by physical touch which acts through the
nerves and muscles directly, or by the sight,
or nearness, or thought of some one lovely and
beloved, which acts indirectly through messages
from the brain, it increases greatly in size, and
becomes stiff, turgid and erect. Many men
imagine that the turgid condition of an erection
is due to the local accumulation of semen, and
that these can only be naturally got rid of by
f.
an ejaculation. This is entirely wrong. The
enlargement of the penis is not at all due to
the presence of actual semen, but is due to the
effects of the nervous reaction on the blood
vessels, leading to the filling, principally, of the
veins, and of the arteries. As the blood enters
but does not leave the penis, the venous cavi-
MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 75
'ties in it fill up with venous blood until the
, whole is rigid. When rigid, this organ is able
to penetrate the female entrance, and there the
further stimulation calls out the semen from
its storehouses, the seminal vesicles, the testes
and the prostate, and they pass down the chan-
nel within the penis (the urethra) and are ex-
pelled.
* If this is clear, it will be realized that the
stiffening and erection does not necessarily call
for relief in the ejaculation of semen. If the
veins can empty themselves, as they naturally
do when the nervous excitement which con- à
stricted them locally passes, the erection will
subside without any loss of semen, by the mere
passing back of the locally excessive blood into
the ordinary circulatory system. This can hap-
pen quite naturally and healthily when the
nerves are soothed, either physically or as a re-
sult of a sense of mental peace and exaltation.
When on the other hand the local excitement
culminates in the calling up and expulsion of
the semen, after it has once started the ejacula-
tion becomes quite involuntary and the sper-
matozoa and the secretions associated with them
pass out of the system and are entirely lost.
Of what does this loss consist? It is esti-
t
76 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
mated that there are about two hundred and
fifty million spermatozoa in a single average
*
|
ejaculation.” Each single one of these (in
healthy men) is capable of fertilizing a woman's
egg-cell and giving rise to a new human being.
(Thus by a single ejaculation one man might
fertilize nearly all the marriageable, women in
the world.) * Each single one of those minute
spermatozoa carries countless hereditary traits,
and each consists very largely of nuclear plasm
—the most highly specialized and richest sub-
stance in our bodies.
It is therefore the greatest mistake to imagine
that the semen is something to be got rid of .
frequently—all the vital energy and the
precious chemical substances which go to its
composition can be better utilized by being
transformed into other creative work on most
days of the ſpenth. And so mystic and won-
derful are the chemical transformations going
on in our bodies that the brain can often set
this alchemy in motion, particularly if the brain
is helped by knowledge. A strong will can of-
ten calm the nerves which regulate the blood
' "See Pflüger’s Archiv. 1891.
*This is less utterly fantastic than it may sound, now that
science has taught us how to fertilize females by semen from
males they may never have seen.
MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 77
supply, and order the distended veins of the
penis to retract and subside without wasting
the semen in an ejaculation.
But while it is good that a man should be
able to do this often, it is not good to try to do
it always. The very restraint which adds to a
man's strength up to a certain point, taxes his
| strength when carried beyond it. It is my be-
lief that just sufficient restraint to carry him
through the ebb-tides of his wife's sex-rhythm
is usually the right amount to give the best
strength, vigor, and joy to a man, if both are
normal people. If the wife has, as I think the
majority of healthy well-fed young women will
be found to have, a fortnightly consciousness
or potentiality of desire, then the two should
find a perfect mutual adjustment in having
fortnightly unions; for this need not be confined
to only a single union on each. ion. Many
men who can well practice restraffit for twelve
or fourteen days, will find that one union only
will not then thoroughly satisfy them; and if
they have the good fortune to have healthy
wives, they will find that the latter, too, have
the desire for several unions in the course of a
day or two. If the wave-crests on our charts
are studied it will be seen that they spread
78 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
over two or three days and show several small
minor crests. This is what happens when a
woman is thoroughly well and vital; her desire
bubbles up during a day or two, sometimes
even every few hours if it does not, and some-
times even if it does, receive satisfaction.
Expressed in general terms (which, of course,
will not fit everybody) my view may be formu-
lated thus: The mutually best regulation of
intercourse in marriage is to have three or
four days of repeated unions, followed by about
ten days without any unions at all, unless some
| strong external stimulus has stirred a mutual
desire.
I have been interested to discover that the
people known to me who have accidentally fixed
upon this arrangement of their lives are happy:
and it should be noted that it fits in with the
charts I give which represent the normal, spon-
taneous feeling of so many women.
There are many women, however, who do not
feel, or who may not at first recognize, a second,
but have only one time of natural pleasure in
sex in each moon-month. Many men of strong
will and temperate lives will be able so to con-
trol themselves that they can adjust themselves
to this more restrained sex-life, as do some with
MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 79
whom I am acquainted. On the other hand,
there will be many who find this period too long
to live through without using a larger amount
of energy in restraining their impulses than is
justifiable. It seems to me never justifiable to
spend so much energy and will power on re-
straining natural impulses, that valuable work
and intellectual power and poise are made to
suffer. If, then, a strongly sexed husband, who
finds it a real loss to his powers of work to
endure through twenty-six days of abstinence,
should find himself married to a wife whose
vitality is so low that she can only take pleasure
in physical union once in her moon-month (in
some it will be before, in some a little time after,
her menstrual flow) he should note carefully
the time she is spontaneously happy in their
union, and then at any cost restrain himself
through the days immediately following, and
about a fortnight after her time of desire he
should set himself ardently to woo her. Un-
less she is actually out of health he is more
likely then than at any other time to succeed
not only in winning her compliance, but also in
giving her enjoyment and attaining mutual
ecstasy. *
The husband who so restrains himself, even
80 LOVE IN MAR&LAGE
if it is hard for, him to do it, will generally
find that he is a thousand fold repaid—not only
by the increasing health and happiness of his
wife, and the much intenser pleasure he gains
from their mutual intercourse, but also by his
own added vitality and sense of self-command.
A fortnight is not too long for a healthy man to
restrain himself with advantage.
Sir Thomas Clouston says (“Before I Wed,”
p. 84): “Nature has so arranged matters that
the more constantly control is exercised the .
more easy and effective it becomes. It becomes
a habit. The less control is exercised, the
greater tendency there is for a desire to become
a craving of an uncontrollable kind, which is
itself of the nature of disease, and means death
sooner or later.” This conclusion is not only
the result of the intellectual and moral experi-
ence of our race, but is supported by physi
logical experiments. r
While a knowledge of the fundamental laws of
our being should in the main regulate our lives,
so, complex are we, so sensitive to a myriad
impressions, that clock-work regularity can
never rule us. * -
Even where the woman is strongly sexed,
with a well-marked recurrence of desire, which
(
MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 81
is generally satisfied by fortnightly unions, it
may not infrequently happen that, in between
these periods, there may be additional special
occasions when there springs up a mutual long-
ing to unite. These will generally depend on
some event in the lovers' lives which stirs their
emotions; some memory of past passion, such
as an anniversary of their wedding, or perhaps
will be due to a novel, poem, or picture which
moves them deeply. If the man she loves plays
the part of tender wooer, even at times when
her passion would not spontaneously arise, a
woman can generally be stirred so fundamental-
ly as to give a passionate return. But at the
times of her ebb-tides the stimulus will have
'to be stronger than at the high tides, and it will
then generally be found that the appeal must
be made even more through her emotional and
spiritual nature and less through the physical
than usual.
The supreme law for husbands is: Bemem.
ber that each act of union must be tenderly
wooed for and won, and that no union should
ever take place unless the woman also desires
it and is made physically ready for it.
While in most marriages the husband has to
restrain himself to meet the wife's less fre-
82 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
quently recurrent rhythm, there are, on the
other hand, marriages in which the husband is
so under-sexed that he cannot have ordinary
union save at very infrequent intervals with-
out a serious effect on his health. If such a
man is married to a woman who has inherited
an unusually strong and over-frequent desire,
he may suffer by union with her, or may cause
her suffering by refusing to unite. In such
cases we are helpless. We have to deal with
one of the many marital tragedies. Unfor-
tunately, the variations in the sex-need of dif-
ferent healthy people is immense, far greater
than can be suggested in this book. * Indeed
the “normal” is rarer than the variations upon
it.
Ellis states that the Queen of Aragon or-
dained that six times a day was the proper
rule in legitimate marriage. So abnormally
sexed a woman would to-day probably succeed
in killing by exhaustion a succession of hus-
bands, for the man who could match such a de-
sire is very rare nowadays.
Though the timing and the frequency of union
* * On this point the reader may consult Dr. Robinson's
“Treatise on Sexual Impotence and Other Sexual Disorders
in Men and Wemen.”
*,
MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 83
are the points about which questions are often-
est asked by the ignorant and well-meaning,
and are most misunderstood, yet there are other
fundamental facts concerning coitus about
which even medical men seem surprisingly
ignorant. Regarding these, a simple statement
of the physiological facts is essential.
An impersonal and scientific knowledge of the
structure of our bodies is the surest safeguard
against prurient curiosity and lascivious gloat-
ing. This knowledge at the back of the minds
of the lovers, though not perhaps remembered
as such, may also spare the unintentioned cruel-
ty of handling which so readily injures one
whose lover is ignorant. . .
What actually happens in an act of union
should be known. After the preliminaries of:
love-play the stimulated penis, erect, enlarged
and stiffened, is pressed into the woman's
vagina. Ordinarily when a woman is not stimu-
lated, the walls of this canal as well as the
exterior lips of soft tissue surrounding its exit,
are dry and rather crinkled, and the vaginal
opening is smaller than the man's extended
organ. But when the woman is what is phys-
iologically called tumescent (that is, when she
is ready for union and has been profoundly
t
84 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
stirred), these parts are all flushed by the inter-
nal blood supply and to some extent are turgid
like those of the man, while there is a plenti-
ful secretion of mucus, which lubricates the
channel of the vagina. In a really ardent
woman the vagina may even spontaneously
open and close as though panting with longing.
(So powerful is the influence of thought on our
bodily structure, that in some people all these
physical results may be brought about by the
thought of the loved one, by the enjoyment of
tender words and kisses, and the beautiful sub-
tleties of wooing). It can therefore be readily
imagined that when the man tries to enter a
woman whom he has not wooed to the point of
stimulating her natural physical reactions of
preparation, he is endeavoring to force his
entry through a dry-walled opening too small .
for it. He may thus cause the woman actual'
pain, apart from the mental revolt and loath-
ing she is likely to feel for a man who so re-
gardlessly uses her. On the other hand, in the
tumescent woman the opening, already natural-
ly expanded, is lubricated by a flow of mucus,
and all the nerves and muscles are ready to
react and easily draw in the man’s entering
Organ.
MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 85
This account is of the meeting of two who
have been already married. The first union
of a virgin girl differs, of course, from all
others, for on that occasion the hymen is
broken. One would think that every girl who
was about to be married would be told of this
necessary rupturing of the membrane and the
temporary pain it will cause her; but even still
large numbers of girls are allowed to marry in
complete and cruel ignorance.
It should be realized that a man does not
woo and win a woman once for all when he mar-
ries her: he must woo her before every separate
act of coitus; for each act corresponds to a
marriage, as the beasts of the field and the fowls
of the air know it. Wild animals are not so
foolish as man; a wild animal does not unite
with his female without the wooing character-
istic of his race, whether by stirring her by a
display of his strength in fighting another male,
or by exhibiting his beautiful feathers or song.
And we must not forget that the wild animals
are assisted by nature; they generally only woo
just at the season when the female is beginning
to feel natural desire. But man, who wants his
mate all out of season as well as in it, has a
double duty to perform, and must himself rouse,
86 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
charm and stimulate her to the local readiness
which would have been to some extent naturally
prepared for him had he waited till her own
desire welled up.
To render a woman ready before uniting with
her is not only the merest act of humanity to
save her pain, but is of value from the man’s
point of view, for (unless he is one of those
relatively few abnormal and diseased variants
who delight only in rape) the man gains an im-
mense increase of sensation from the mutuality
thus attained. [See note at end of book.]
When the two have met and united, the usual
result is that, after a longer or shorter interval,
the man’s mental and physical stimulation
reaches a climax in sensory intoxication and in
the ejaculation of semen. Where the two are
perfectly adjusted, the woman simultaneously
reaches the crisis of nervous reactions and
muscular convulsions similar to his. This
mutual orgasm is extremely important, but in
distressingly many cases the man’s climax
comes so swiftly that the woman’s reactions are
not nearly ready and she is left without it.
Though in some instances the woman may
have one or more crises before the man achieves
his, it is perhaps hardly an exaggeration to
MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 87
say that 70 or 80 per cent. of our married
women (in the middle and intellectual classes)
are deprived of the full orgasm through the
excessive speed of the husband's reactions, i.e.,
through premature ejaculation (ejaculatio
precox) or through some mal-adjustment of
the relative shapes and positions of the organs. .
So complex, so profound, are woman’s sex-in-
stincts that in rousing them the man is rousing
her whole body and soul. And this takes time.:*
More time indeed than the average husband “
dreams of spending upon it. Yet woman has
' at the surface a small vestigial organ called -
the clitoris, which corresponds morphologically
to the man’s penis and which, like it, is extreme-
ly sensitive to touch-sensations. This little
rest, which lies anteriorly between the inner
lips round the vagina, erects itself when thei
woman is really tumescent, and by the stimula-
tion of movement it is intensely roused and
transmits this stimulus to every nerve in her
body. But even after a woman's dormant sex-
feeling is aroused and all the complex reactions;
of her being have been set in motion, it may:
take from ten to twenty minutes of actual;
physical union to consummate her feeling, while;
one, two or three minutes of actual union often
88 LOVE IN MARBLAGE
satisfies a man who is ignorant of the art of
controlling his reactions so that he may ex-
perience the added enjoyment of a mutual si-
A multaneous orgasm. * *
A number of well-meaning people deman
from men absolute “continence” save for pro-
creation only. They overlook the innumerable
physiological reactions concerned in the act,
as well as the subtle spiritual alchemy of it.
and propound the view that “the opposition
to continence, save for procreation only, has but
one argument to put forward, and that is ap-
petite, selfishness.” (Mary Teats, “The Way
of God in Marriage.”)
It should be realized, however, that the com-
plete act of union is a triple consummation,
It symbolizes, and at the same time actually
enhances, the spiritual union: there are a
myriad subtleties of soul-structure which are
compounded in this alchemy. At the same time
the act gives the most intense physical pleasure
which the body can experience, and it is a mu-
tual not a selfish pleasure, more calculated than
anything else to draw out an unspeakable ten-
derness and understanding in both partakers
of this sacrament; while thirdly, it is the act
which gives rise to a new life by rendering pos.
MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 89
l: the fusion of one of the innumerable male
spermatozoa with the female egg-cell.
It often happens, nowadays, that dreading the
expense and the physical strain of child-bearing
for his wife, the husband practices what is
called coitus interruptus: that is, he withdraws
just before the ejaculation, but when he is
already so stimulated that the ejaculation has
become involuntary. In this way the semen is
spent, but, as it does not enter the wife's body,
fertilization and consequently procreation can-
not take place. This practice, while it may have
saved the woman the anguish of bearing un-
wanted children, is yet very harmful to her,
and is to be deprecated. It tends to leave the
woman in “mid-air” as it were; to leave her
stimulated and unsatisfied, and therefore it has
a very bad effect on her nerves and general
health, particularly if it is done frequently.
The woman, too, loses the advantage (and I am
convinced that it is difficult to overstate the
physiological advantage) of the partial absorp-
tion of the man’s secretions, which must take
place through the large tract of internal epithe-
lium with which they come in contact. If, as
physiology has already proved to be the case,
internal absorption of secretions from the
90 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
sex organs plays so large a part in determining
the health and character of remote parts of the
ody, it is extremely likely that the highly
timulating secretion of man's semen can and
does penetrate and affect the woman’s whole
organism. Actual experiment has shown that
iodine placed in the vagina in solution is so
quickly absorbed by the epithelial walls that
in an hour it has penetrated the system and is
even being excreted. It still remains, however,
for scientific experiments to be devised which
will enable us to study the effects of the ab-
sorption of substances from the semen. On the
other hand, coitus interruptus is not always
harmful for the man, for he has the complete
sex-act, though a good many men think its ef-
fects on them are undesirable, and it may lead
to lack of desire or even impotence. It is cer-
tainly bad when its safety from consequences
induces him to frequent indulgence, for thus
wastefully to scatter what should be creative
power is to reduce his own vitality" and power
of work. By those who have a high apprecia-
tion of the value of their creative impulse, and
who wish to enjoy the mutual pleasure and en-
hancement of sex-union without wasting it, this
method should not be practiced. t
$
MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 91
[Personal experience with thousands of men
and hundreds of women who have been the vic-
tims of coitus interruptus, coitus incompletus
or coitus prolongatus entitles the editor to
speak with authority on the subject. It is hard
to determine who, the man or the woman, is
more seriously, more extensively injured by the
practice; but my own impression is that it is
the man. While, as a result of the practice,
both may become afflicted with a lack of libido,
or even a distaste and loathing of sex relations,
tachycardia, neurasthenia, etc., there is one
condition which may and often does affect the
man, but from which the woman remains free,
and that is: impotentia coeundi. Atony and
congestion of the prostate are also conditions
from which the man alone suffers.
As to absorption of the semen by the female
genitals, no scientific proof exists that even ab-
sorption takes place. Of the absorption by the
vaginal epithelium there can be no question;
there is some likelihood of absorption by the
epithelium of the lining membrane of the uterus.
But even here scientific proof is still lacking.
The absorption of one’s own internal secre-
tions is not an analogous case: Here the secre-
tion is poured directly into one's own blood or
92 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
lymph stream. But it is a fact that many
women suffer intensely when in their sex rela-
tions they are deprived of the semen, either
through the practice of coitus interruptus or
through the use of a condom. W. J. R.]
It should never be forgotten that without the
discipline of control there is no lasting delight
in erotic feeling. The fullest delight, even in
a purely physical sense, can only be attained by
those who curb and direct their natural im-
pulses.
Dr. Saleeby's words are appropriate in this
connection: (Introduction to Forel’s “Sexual
Ethics”): “Professor Forel speaks of subdu-
ing the sexual instinct. I would rather speak
of transmuting it. The direct method of at-
tack is often futile, always necessitous of ef-
fort, but it is possible for us to transmute our
sex-energy into higher forms in our individual
lives, thus justifying the evolutionary and
physiological contention that is the source of
the higher activities of men, of moral indig-
nation, and of the “restless energy' which has
changed the surface of the earth.”
Forel says (“The Sexual Question”) : “Be-
fore engaging in a life-long union, a man and
woman ought to explain to each other their
MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 93
sexual feelings so as to avoid deception and in-
compatibility later on.” This would be ad-
mirable advice were it possible for a virgin
girl to know much about the reactions and ef-
fects upon her mind and body of the act of
coitus, but she does not. Actually it often takes
several years for eager and intelligent couples
fully to probe themselves and to discover the
extent and meaning of the immensely profound
physiological and spiritual results of marriage.
Yet it is true that a noble frankness would save
much misery when, as happens not infrequent.
ly, one or the other of the pair marries with
the secret determination not to have any chil.
dren.
So various are we all as individuals, so com
plex all the reactions and later-reactions of sex
relations, that no hard and fast rule can be laid
down. Each couple, after marriage, must
study themselves, and the lover and the beloved
must do what best serves them both and gives
them the highest degree of mutual joy and
power. There are, however, some laws which
should be inviolable. Their details can be gath-
ered from the preceding pages, and they are
summed up in the words: “Love worketh no ill º
to the beloved.”
f
V
CHAPTER VI
SLEEP
“He giveth His beloved sleep.”
THE healing magic of sleep is known to all.
Sleeplessness is a punishment for so many
different violations of nature's laws, that it is
perhaps one of the most prevalent of human-
ity’s innumerable sufferings. While most of
the aspects of sleep and sleeplessness have re-
ceived much attention from specialists in human
physiology, the relation between sleep and
coitus appears to be but little realized: Yet
there is an intimate, profound and quite direct
relation between the power of sleep, naturally
and refreshingly, and the harmonious relief of
the whole system in the perfected sex-act.
We see this very clearly in the case of the
ordinary healthy man. If, for some reason, he
has to live unsatisfied for some time after the
acute stirring of his longing for physical con-
94
SLEEP 95
tact with his wife, he tends to be wakeful, rest-
less, and his nerves are on edge. ~!
Then, when the propitious hour arrives, and,
after the love-play, the growing passion º
pands, until the transports of rapture find their |
ending in the explosive completion of the act,
at once the tension of his whole system relaxes, |
and his muscles fall into gentle, easy attitudes
of languorous content, and in a few moments
the man is sleeping like a child. …”
This excellent and refreshing sleep falls like
a soft curtain of oblivion and saves the man's
consciousness from the jar and disappointment
of an anti-climax. But not only is this sleep a
restorative after the strenuous efforts of the
transport, it has peculiarly refreshing powers,
and many men feel that after such a sleep their
whole system seems rejuvenated.
But how fare women in this event? When
they too have had complete satisfaction they
similarly relax and sink into a peaceful re-
freshing slumber.
But as things are to-day it is scarcely an
exaggeration to say that the majority of wives
are left wakeful and nerve-racked to watch with
tender motherly brooding, or with bitter and
jeakºus envy, the deep slumbers of the men who,
$.
96 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
through ignorance and carelessness, have neg-
lected to see that they too received full satis-
faction.
Many married women have told me that after
relations with their husbands they are restless,
either for some hours or for the whole night;
and I feel sure that the prevalent neglect on
the part of men to see that their wives have
orgasms at each congress, must be a very com-
mon source of the sleeplessness and nervous
diseases of so many married women.
The relation between the completion of the
sex-act and sleep in woman is well indicated in
the case of Mrs. A. who is typical of a large class
of wives. She married a man with whom she
was passionately in love. Neither she nor her
husband had ever had connection with any one .
else, and, while they were both keen and in-
telligent people with some knowledge of biology,
neither knew anything of the details of the
human sex union. For several years her hus-
band had unions with her which gave him some
satisfaction and left him ready at once to sleep.
Neither he nor she knew that women should
have an orgasm, and after every union she was
left so “on edge,” restless and wakeful, so that
several hours would generally elapse before
SLEEP 97
she could sleep at all, and often she remained
sleepless the whole night.
After her husband's death her health im-
proved, and in a year or two she entered into
a new relation with a man who was aware of
woman's needs and gave sufficient time and at-
tention to them to insure a successful orgasm
for her as well as for himself. The result was
that she soon became a good sleeper, with the
attendant benefits of restored nerves and
health.
Sleep is so complex a process, and sleepless-
ness the resultant of so many different mal-ad-
justments, that it is, of course, possible that
the woman may sleep well enough, even if she
be deprived of the relief and pleasure of per-
fect union. But in so many married women
sleeplessness and a consequent nervous condi-
tion are coupled with a lack of the complete sex
relation, that one of the first questions a physi-
cian should put to those of his women patients
who are worn and sleepless is whether her hus-
band really fulfills his marital duty in their
physical relation.
From their published statements, and their
admissions to me, it appears that many prac-
ticing doctors are either almost unaware of the
98 LOVE IN MARBLAGE
very existence of orgasm in women, or look
upon it as a superfluous and accidental phenom-
enon. Yet to have had a moderate number of
orgasms at some time at least, is a necessity
for the full development of a woman's health
and all her powers.
As this book is written for those who are mar-
ried, I say nothing here about the lives of those
who are still unmarried, though, particularly
after the age of thirty has been reached, their
case may be very sad and need much study and
consideration. It is, however, worth noticing
how prevalent sleeplessness is among a class
of women who have never practiced any self-
indulgence or allowed any relief to their desires.--
• There is little doubt that the complete lack of
normal sex relations is one of the several fac-
tors which render many middle-aged unmarried
women nervous and sleepless.
Yet for the unmarried woman the lack is not
so acute nor so localized as it is for the mar-
ried woman who is thwarted in the natural com-
pletion of her sex-functions after they have been
directly stimulated.
The unmarried woman, unless she be in love
with some particular man, has no definite
stimulus to her sex desires beyond the natural
SLEEP 99
upwelling of the sex urge. The married woman,
however, is not only diffusely stirred by the
presence of the man she loves, but is also acute-
ly, locally and physically, stimulated by his re-
lation with her. And if she is then left in mid-
air, without natural relief to her tension, she
is in this respect far worse off than her un-
married sister.
Nevertheless, many unmarried women suffer
from sleeplessness as a result of their celibacy,
quite unconscious of its cause.
We are, however, only concerned here with
the married woman. When she is left sleep-
less through the neglect of the mate who slum-
bers soundly by her side, it is not surprising
if she spends the long hours reviewing their
mutual position; and the review cannot yield
her much pleasure or satisfaction. For de-
prived of the physical delight of mutual orgasm
(though perhaps, like so many wives, quite un-
conscious of all it can give), she sees in the sex
act an arrangement where pleasure, relief and
Subsequent sleep are all on her husband's side,
while she is merely the passive instrument of
his enjoyment. Nay, more than that: if fol-
lowing every union she has long hours of wake-
fulness, she then sees clearly the encroachſient
100 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
on her own health of an arrangement in which
she is not merely passive, but is actively abused.
Another of the consequences of the incom-
plete relation is that often, stirred to a point
of wakefulness and vivacity by the preliminary
sex-stimulation (of the full meaning of which
she may be unconscious), a romantic and
thoughtful woman is then most able to talk in-
timately and tenderly—to speak of the things
most near and sacred to her heart. And she
may then be terribly wounded by the inatten-
tion of her husband, which, coming so soon af-
ter his ardent demonstrations of affection, ap-
pears peculiarly callous, It makes him appear
to her to be indifferent to the highest side of
marriage—the spiritual and romantic inter-
course. Thus she may see in the man going off
to sleep in the midst of her love-talk, a gross
and inattentive brute—and all because she has
never shared the climax of his physical tension,
and does not know that its natural reaction is
sleep.
These thoughts are so depressing even to the
tenderest and most loving woman, and so bitter
to one who has other causes of complaint, that
iñ their turn they act on the whole system and
SLEEP 101
increase the damage done by the mere sleep-
lessness. g
The older school of physiologists dealt in
methods too crude to realize the physiological
results of our thoughts, but it is now well known
that anger and bitterness have experimentally
recognizable physiological effects, and are in-
jurious to the whole system.
It requires little imagination to see that after
months or years of such embittered sleepless-
ness, the woman tends not only to become neu-
rasthenic but also resentful toward her hus-
band. She is probably too ignorant and unob-
servant of her own physiology to realize the
full meaning of what is taking place, but she
feels vaguely that he is to blame, and that she
is being sacrificed for what, in her still greater
ignorance of his physiology, seems to her to be
his mere pleasure and self-indulgence.
He, with his health maintained by the natural
outlet followed by recuperative sleep, is not
likely to be ready to look into the gloomy and
shadowy land of vague reproach and inexplic-
able trivial wrongs which are all the expression
she gives to her unformulated physical griev-
ance. So he is likely to set down any resent-
ment she may show to “nerves” or “captious-
102 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
ness”; and to be first solicitous of and then im-
patient towards her apparently irrelevant com-
plaints.
If he is, as many men are, tender and con-
siderate, he may try to remedy matters by re-
stricting to the extreme limit of what is ab-
solutely necessary for him, the number of times
they come together. Unconsciously he thus only
makes matters worse; for as a general rule, he
is quite unaware of his wife’s rhythm, and does
not arrange to coincide with it in his infre-
quent tender embraces. As he is now prob-
ably sleeping in another room and not daring to
come for the nightly talks and tenderness which
are so sweet a privilege of marriage, here, as
in other ways, his well-meaning but wrongly
conceived efforts at restraint only tend to drive
the pair still further apart.
To make plain the reasonableness of my view
regarding sleep, it is necessary to mention
some of the immensely profound influences
which it is now known that sex exerts, even
when not stimulated to its specific use.
In those who are deprived of their sex-organs,
particularly when young, many of the other fea-
tures and organs of the body develop abnor-
mally or fail to appear. Castrated boys
SLEEP 103
(Eunuchs) when grown up, tend to have little
or no beard, or mustache, to have high-pitched
voices and several other characters which
separate them from normal men. t
The growth of organs and structures so re-
mote from the sex-organs as, e. g., the larynx
have been found to be influenced by the chemi-
cal stimulus of secretions from the sex organs
and their subsidiary glands. These secretions
are not passed out through external ducts but
enter the blood system directly. Such secre-
tions passing straight from the ductless glands
into the vascular system are of very great im-
portance in almost all our bodily functions.
They have been deeply studied of late, and the
general name of Hormones given to them by
Starling.” The idea that some particular se-
cretions or “humors” are connected with each
of the internal organs of the body, is a very
ancient one; but we have even yet only the
vaguest and most elementary knowledge of a
few of the many miracles performed by these
subtle chemical substances. Thus we know that
the stimulus of food in the stomach sends a
chemical substance from one ductless gland in
*See Prof. Ernest H. Starling's Croonian Leeture to the
Royal Society, 1905,
104 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
the digestive system chasing through the blood
to another gland which prepares a different di-
gestive secretion further on. We know that the
thyroid gland in the neck swells and contracts
in very sensitive relation with the sex organs;
we know that some chemical secretion from
the developing embryo, or the tissue in which
it grows, sends its chemical stimulus to the
distant mammary glands of the mother; we
know that if the ovaries of a girl or the testes
of a boy are completely cut out, the far-reach-
ing influences their hormones would have
exerted are made evident by the numerous
changes in the system and departures from the
normal, which result from their lack.
But we do not know, for physiologists have
not yet studied the degree and character of
the immense stimulus of sex-life and experi-
ence on the glands of the sex-organs, or how
they affect the whole of the human being's life
and powers. -
The “Mendelians” and the **Mutationists”
who both tend to lay so much (and I think such
undue) stress on morphological hereditary fac-
tors, seem at present to have the ear of the
public more than the physiologists. But it is
more important that every grown up man and
SLEEP 105
woman should know that through the various
chemical substances or “messengers” (which
Starling calls the hormones) there is an ex-
tremely rapid, almost immediate, effect on the
activities of organs in remote parts of the body,
due to the influences exerted on one or another
internal organ. •
It is therefore clear that any influences ex-
erted on such profoundly important organs as
those connected with sex, must have far-reach-
ing results in many unexpected fields.
What must be taking place in the female sys-
tem as a result of the completed sex act?
It is true that in coitus woman has but a
slight external secretion, and that principally
of mucus. But we have no external signs of
all the complex processes and reactions going
on in digestion and during the production of
digestive secretions. When, as is the case in
orgasm, we have such intense and apparent
nervous, vascular and muscular reactions, it
seems inevitable that there must be correspond-
ingly profound internal correlations. Is it
conceivable that organs so fundamental, whose
mere existence we know affects the personal
characters of women, could escape physiologi-
106 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
cal result, from the intense preliminary stimulus
and acute sensations of an orgasm?
To ask this question is surely to answer it.
It is to my mind inconceivable that the orgasm
in woman as in man should not have profound
physiological effects. Did we know enough
about the subject, many of the “nervous break-
downs” and neurotic tendencies of the modern
woman could be directly traced to the partial
stimulation of sexual intercourse without its
normal completion which is so prevalent in
modern marriage.
This subject, and its numerous ramifications,
are well worth the careful research of the most
highly trained physiologists. There is nothing
more profound, or of more vital moment to
modern humanity as a whole, than is the un-
derstanding of the sex nature and sex needs of
en and women.
I may point out as a mere suggestion that
the man’s sex organs give rise to eaternal and
also to internal secretions. The former only
leave the glands which secrete them as a result
of definite stimulus; the latter appear to be
perpetually exuded in small quantities and al-
ways to be entering and influencing the whole
system. In woman we know there are corre-
SLEEP 107
sponding perpetual internal secretions, and it
seems evident to me that there must be some
internal secretions which are only released un-
der the definite stimulus of the whole sex-act.
The English and American peoples, who lead
the world in so many ways, have an almost un-
precedentedly high proportion of married
women who get no satisfaction from physical
union with their husbands, though they bear
children, and may in every other respect ap-
pear to be happily married.
The modern civilized neurotic woman has be-
come a by-word in the Western world. Why?
I am certain that much of this suffering is
caused by the ignorance of both men and women
regarding not only the inner physiology, but
even the obvious outward expression, of the
Complete sex-act.
Many medical men now recognize that numer-
ous nervous and other diseases are associated
with the lack of physiological relief for natural
or stimulated sex feelings in women. Ellis
(“Sex in Relation to Society,” 1910, p. 551)
quotes the opinion of an Austrian gynecologist
who said that, “of every hundred women who
come to him with uterine troubles, seventy
suffer from congestion of the womb, which he
108 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
regarded as due to incomplete coitus.” While
a writer in the British Medical Journal (April
1, 1911, p. 784) published some cases in which
quite serious nervous diseases in wives were
put right when their husbands were cured of
too hasty ejaculation.
Sleep, concerning which I began this chapter,
is but one of innumerable indications of inner
processes intimately bound up with the sex-
reactions. When the sex-rite is, in every sense,
rightly performed, the healing wings of sleep
descend both on the man and on the woman in
his arms. Every organ in their bodies is in-
fluenced and stimulated to play its part, while
their spirits, after soaring in the dizzy heights
of rapture, are wafted to oblivion, thence to
return gently to the ordinary plains of daily
consciousness.
CHAPTER VII
MODESTY AND ROMANCE
“A person ean therefore no more promise to love or not to
love than he can promise to live long. What he can promise
is to take good care of his life and of his love.”—ELLEN KEY.
ARTISTs clearly, and poets in veiled language,
have in all ages expressed the glory of the
naked human body. Before the Venus of Milo
in her Paris home, even the empty-headed and
ridiculously dressed creatures of fashion stand
for a moment with a catch in the throat and a
sense that here is something full of divine
secrets. One day, when I was doing my rever-
ence before this ancient goddess, drinking in
strength and happiness from the harmonies of
her curves, a preposterously corseted doll
came up to the statue, paused, and said with
tears, in her voice to the man beside her:
“Hasn’t she got the loveliest figure!”
If cold marble so stirs us, how much more
the warmth and vitality of living beauty! Any
well-formed young man or woman is immeasur-
109
110 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
ably more graceful when free from the clinging
follies of modern dress, while a beautiful
woman’s body has a supernal loveliness at
which no words short of poetic rapture can
even hint. What wonder then that one of the
ecstasies of love should be the unveiling of the
beloved?
A man or woman perfectly naked cannot be
tawdry. The fripperies, the jagged curves and
inharmonious lines and colors of the so-called
“adornments” are surmounted, and the naked
figure stepping from their scattered pile is
seen in its utter simplicity. How charming
even the raggedest little street urchins become
when they leave their rags on the bank and
plunge into the water!
It is therefore not surprising that one of the
innumerable sweet impulses of love should be
to reveal, each to each, this treasure of living
beauty: To give each other the right to enter
and enjoy the sight which most of all sights
in the world draws and satisfies the artist’s
eyes.
This impulse, however, is, on the part of the
woman, swayed by two at least of the natural
results of her rhythmic tides. For some time
during each month, age-long tradition that she
MODESTY AND ROMANCE 111
is “unclean,” coupled with her obvious require.
ments, have made her withdraw herself from
even her husband’s gaze. But on the other
hand there comes the time before menstrua-
tion when her body is raised to a higher point
of loveliness than usual by the rounding and
extra fullness of the breasts. (This is one of
the regular physiological results of the pro-
cesses going on within her, of which menstrua-
tion is only the outward sign.) Partly or
wholly unconscious of the brilliance and full
perfection of her beauty, she yet delights in its
gentle promptings to reveal itself to her lover's
eyes when he adores. This innocent, this god-
dess-like self-confidence retreats when the nat-
ural ebb of her vitality returns.
How fortunate for man when these sweet
changes in his beloved are not coerced into uni-
formity! For man has still so much of the
ancient hunter in his blood, that beauty which
is always at hand and ever upon its pedestal,
must inevitably attract him far less than the
elusive and changing charms of rhythmic life.
In the highly evolved and cultivated woman,
who has wisdom enough not to restrict but to
give full play to the great rhythms of her being,
man's polygamous instinct can be satisfied and
112 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
charmed by the ever-changing aspects of her-
self which naturally come uppermost. And
one of her natural phases is at times to retreat,
to experience a profound sex indifference, and
passionately to resent any encroachment on her
solitude. -
This is something woman too often forgets.
She has been so thoroughly “domesticated” by
man that she feels too readily that after mar-
riage she is all his. And by her very docility
to his perpetual demands, she destroys for him
the elation, the palpitating thrills and surprises,
of the chase.
In the rather trivial terms of our sordid
modern life, it works out in many marriages
somewhat as follows: The married pair share
a bed-room, often even a bed (though this de-
testable habit is fortunately rapidly decreas-
ing) and so it comes about that the two are
together not only at the times of delight and
interest in each other, but during most of the
unlovely and even ridiculous proceedings of the
toilet. Now, it may enchant a man once—per-
haps even twice—or at long intervals—to watch
his goddess screw her hair up into a tight and
unbecoming knot and soap her ears. But it is
inherently too unlovely a proceeding to retain
MODESTY AND ROMANCE 113
indefinite enchantment. To see her floating in
‘the deep clear water of her bath—that may
enchant forever, for it is so lovely, but the un-
beautiful trivialities essential to the cleaning
processes of a bath, tend only to dim the picture
and, if repeated, to dull the interest and at-
tention that should be bestowed on the body of
the loved one. Hence, ultimately, everyday
association in the commonplace daily necessi-
ties, tends to reduce the keen pleasure each
takes in the sight of the other. And hence,
inevitably and tragically though stealthily and
unperceived, to reduce the keenness of stimula-
tion the pair exert on each other, and thus to
lower their intensity of pleasure in the sex act.”
*A quotation from W. J. Thomas, “Sex and Society,” is
here very apt, though he had been speaking not of man, but
of the love play and coyness shown by female, birds and
animals,
“We must also recognize the fact that reproductive life
must be connected with violent stimulation, or it would be
neglected and the species would become extinct; and on the
other hand if the eonquest of the female were too easy, sexual
life would be in danger of becoming a play interest and a
dissipation, destruetive of energy and fatal to the speeies.
Working, we may assume, by a process of selection and sur-
vival, nature has both seeured and safe-guarded reproduction.
The female will not submit to seizure except in a high state
of nervous excitation (as is seen especially well in the wooing
of birds), while the male must conduct himself in such a way
as to manipulate the female; and, as the more active agent, he
114 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
In short, the overcoming of her personal
modesty which is generally looked on as an es-
sential result in marriage where the woman be-
comes wholly the man's, has generated among
our women a tradition that before their hus-
bands they can perform any and all of the de-
tails of personal and domestic duties. Cor-
respondingly, they allow the man to be neg-
lectful of preserving some reticence before
them. This mutual possession of the lower and
more elementary experiences of life has been,
in innumerable marriages, a factor in destroy-
ing the mutual possession of life's higher and
more poetic charms.
In this respect I am inclined to think that man
suffers more than woman. For man is still
essentially the hunter, the one who experiences
the desires and thrills of the chase, and dreams
ever of coming unawares upon Diana in the
woodlands. On the other hand, the married
woman, having once yielded all, tends to re-
main passively in the man's companionship.
&
p
t
i.
Though it may appear trivial beside the pro-
develops a marvellous display of technique for this purpose.
f This is offset by the eoyness and eoquetry of the female, by
which she equally attracts and fascinates the male, and prae-
tices upon him to induce a corresponding state of nervous
excitation.” -
MODESTY AND ROMANCE 115
found physiological factors considered in re-
cent chapters, I think that, in the interest of
husbands, an important piece of advice to wives
is: Be always escaping. Escape the lower, the
trivial, the sordid. So far as possible (and this
is far more possible than appears at first, and
requires only a little care and rearrangement
in the habits of the household) ensure that you
allow your husband to come upon you only when
there is delight in the meeting. A fleeting
glimpse of mutinous face as you lock yourself
in the bathroom, is far kinder to a man than
the wifely docility of sharing a toilet table and
washstand.
CHAPTER VIII
ABSTINIENCE
"Hew intoxicating indeed, how penetrating—like a most
precious wine—is that love which is the sexual transformed
by the magic of the will into the emotional and spiritual?
And what a loss on the merest grounds of prudenee and the
economy of pleasure is its unbridled waste along physical chan-
nels! So nothing is so much to be dreaded between lovers
as just this—the vulgarisation of love—and this is the rock
upon which marriage so often splits.”—Edward CARPENTEs.
AND because marriage so often splits upon
this rock, or because men and women have in
all ages yearned for spiritual beauty, there
have been those who have shut themselves off
from all the sweet usages of the body. In the
struggle of man to gain command over his body,
and in the slow and often backsliding evolution
of the higher love, there is no doubt that hu-
manity owes much to the ascetic. But this
debt is in the past. We are now gaining con-
trol of the lower forces, we are winning knowl-
edge of the complex meanings and the spiritual
transformations of our physical reactions, and
116
ABSTINENCE 117
in the future the highest social unit will be
recognized to be the pair, fused in love so that
all human potentialities are theirs, as well as
the higher potentialities which only perfect love
can originate. -
Yet, as we live to-day, with still so many
remnants of the older standards within and
upon us, we must endeavor to understand the
ascetic. He (less often she) is by no means
seldom one of the products of marriage. It
not infrequently happens that after a love-mar-
riage and some years of what is considered
happiness, the man or woman may withdraw
from the sex-life, often looking down upon it,
and considering that they have reached a higher
plane by so doing. But such people seldom ask
themselves if, while they lived it, they reached
the highest possible level of the sex-life. -
One of the most famous instances of the mar-
ried ascetic is Tolstoy, whose later opinion was
that the highest human being completely inhib-
its his sex-desires and lives a celibate life.
Ascetics, however, seldom have much knowledge
of human physiology, and it seems to me that
with all their fine and religious fervor, they
often lack the mysticism necessary for the full
realization of the meaning and potentialities
118 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
of the new creation resulting from man’s and
woman's highest union. Doubtless if for an
hour we were to take the place of the individ-
ual chemical atoms of Oxygen or of Hydrogen,
we could have no inkling of the physical prop-
erties of the water-drop they together form.
Christianity, like most religions, had a strong
wave of asceticism early in its history. While
there was, as there still is, a harsh asceticism
which is hostile to the other sex, it is of much
interest to see that.there was also a romantic
asceticism which, while revolting from the sen-
suality of its pagan contemporaries, did not en-
tirely prohibit the “charms and pleasures of
mutual companionship. Thus, in a mutilated
form, it seems, these early Christian ascetics
gained some of the immaterial benefits of mar-
riage. Ellis (“Sex and Society”) gives an in-
teresting account of these ascetic love-unions:
“Our fathers,” Chrysostom begins (“Against
those who keep Virgins in their Houses”) only knew
two forms of sexual intimacy, marriage and fornica-
tion. Now a third form has appeared: men intro-
duce young girls into their houses and keep them
there permanently, respecting their virginity.
“What,” Chrysostom asks, “is the reason? It seems
to me that life in common with a woman is sweet, even
ABSTINENCE 119
outside conjugal union and fleshly commerce. That
is my feeling; and perhaps it is not my feeling alone;
it may also be that of these men. They would not
hold their honor so cheap nor give rise to such scandals
if this pleasure were not violent and tyrannical. . . .
That there should really be a pleasure in this which
produces a love more ardent than conjugal union may
surprise you at first. But when I give you the proofs
you will agree that it is so.” The absence of re-
straint to desire in marriage; he continues, often leads
to speedy disgust, and even apart from this, sexual
intercourse, pregnancy, delivery, lactation, the bring-
ing up of children, and all the pains and anxieties that
accompany these things, soon destroy youth and dull
the point of pleasure. The virgin is free from these
burdens. She retains her vigor and her youthfulness,
and even at the age of forty may rival the young
nubile girl. “A double ardor thus burns in the heart
of him who lives with her, and the gratification of
desire never extinguishes the bright flame which ever
continues to increase in strength.” Chrysostom de-
scribes minutely all the little cares and attentions
which the modern girls of his time required, and
which these men delighted to expend on their virginal
sweethearts whether in public or in private. He can-
not help thinking, however, that the man who lavishes
kisses and caresses on a woman whose virginity he
retains is putting himself somewhat in the position of
120 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
Tantalus. But this new refinement of tender chastity,
which came as a delicious discovery to the early Chris-
tians who resolutely thrust away the licentiousness
of the pagan world, was deeply rooted, as we discover
from the frequency with which the grave Fathers of
the Church, apprehensive of scandal, felt called upon
to reprove it, though their condemnation is sometimes
not without a trace of secret sympathy.
“Thus Jerome, in his letter to Eustochium, refers
to those couples who ‘share the same room,” often
even the same bed, and call us suspicious if we draw
any conclusions; while Cyprian (Epistola, 86) is un-
able to approve of those men'he hears of, one a dea-.
con, who live in familiar intercourse with virgins,
even sleeping in the same bed with them, for, he de-
clares the feminine sex is weak and youth is wanton.”
*The harsh ascetic, however, is the one the
word ascetic most generally conjures up. Even
if he accomplishes miracles of self-restraint,
and subdues desire, he is often weakened rather
than strengthened by his determination to flout
nature. Save only in the truly great, there is
a warping and narrowing which results from
coercing beyond the limits of reason the desires
which were implanted in Adam and Eve when
they were told to be fruitful and multiply.
ABSTINENCE 121
As Ellen Key says (“Love and Marriage”):
“Those ascetics who recommend only self-control
as a remedy for the mastery of sexual instinct, even
when such control becomes merely obstructive to life,
are like the physician who tried only to drive the
fever out of his patient: it was nothing to him that
the sick man died of the cure.
“But these ascetics may have arrived at their fanat-
icism by two different paths. One group—which in-
cludes most of the female ascetics—hates Cupid be-
cause he has never shown to them any favor. The
other group—embracing the majority of male ascetics
—curses him because he never leaves them in peace.”
Approaching the subject in a more modern
and scientific attitude of impartial inquiry, the
medical man can produce an imposing list of
diseases more or less directly caused by ab-
stinence both in men and in women. Thése dis-
eases range from neuralgia and “nerves” to
actual fibroid growths. And it is well worthy of
remark that these diseases may be present when
the patient (as have many unmarried women)
has no idea that the sex-impulse exists unmas-
tered.
* I should prefer to use the word “disorders” instead of
diseases. As to fibroid tumors as a result of abstinence-ne
scientifie authentie data are available on this point.
122 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
Thus the ascetic and the profligate (whether
or not in legal marriage) have both to run the
gauntlet of disease. There is, however, no dis-
ease I know of which is caused by the normal
and mutually happy marriage relation—a rela-
tion which certainly to most has positive heal-
ing and vitalizing power.
The profound truth which is perceived by the
ascetics is that the creative energy of sex can
be transformed into other activities. This
truth should never be lost sight of in marriage;
the periods of complete abstinence, between the
times of natural, happy, and also stimulating
exercise of the sex-functions, should be oppor-
tunities for transmuting the healthy sex-power
into work of every sort.
CHAPTER IX
CEIDLDREN
I am for you, and you are for me,
Not only for our own sake, but for others' sakes,
Envelop’d in you sleep greater heroes and bards,
They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me.
—WALT WHITMAM.
THE Mystic in his moment of enlightenment
attains through the flux of his personality the
realization of oneness with the divine forces of
the Universe.
To ordinary men and women, however, this
mystical ecstasy is unknown, and the ordinary
human consciousness is far more aware of its
Separateness than of its oneness with the vital
forces of creation. Yet the glow of half swoon-
ing rapture in which the Mystic's whole being
melts and floats in the light of the divine force
is paralleled in the rapture of lovers.
When two who are mated in every respect
burn with the fire of the innumerable forces
within them, which set their bodies longing to-
. ' 123
124 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
ward each other with the desire to inter-pene-
trate and to encompass one another, the fusion
joy and rapture is not purely physical. The
half swooning sense of flux which overtakes the
spirit in that moment at the apex of rapture
sweeps into its tides the whole essence of the
man and woman, and as it were, the heat of the
contact vaporizes their consciousness so that it
fills the whole of cosmic space. For the
moment they are identified with the divine
thoughts, the waves of eternal force, which to
the Mystic often appear in terms of golden
light.
From their mutual penetration into the
realms of supreme joy, the two lovers bring
back with them a spark of that light which we
call life. -
And unto them a child is born.
This is the supreme purpose of nature in all
her enticing weft of complex factors luring the
two lovers into each other’s arms. Only by the
fusion of two can the new human life come into
being, and only by creating a new life in this .
way can we hand on the torch which lights our
consciousness in the sphere of matter.
This mystical and wonderful fact has never
yet found the poet to sing its full glory. But
CHILDREN & 125
in the hearts of all who have known true love
lies the realization of the sacredness that is
theirs when they are in the very act of crea-
tion.
Were our bodies specifically organized for
this supreme purpose, two human beings would
only pass through the sacred fire of mutual
fusion in order to create a new life. But, how-
ever far our spirits have evolved, our bodies
are composed of matter which bears the im-
print of the many past phases through which
we have reached our present position. And be-
cause in the world of the lower animals there is
an immense wastage of all the young lives cre-
ated, and it is necessary that myriads should be
conceived in order that a small number should
reach maturity, so in our bodies (specialized
though they are in comparison with the lower
animals) both sexes still produce a far larger
number of germs awaiting fertilization than
can be actually fructified and imbued with in-
dividual life.
It is utterly impossible, organized as our
bodies are at present, for us to obey the dic-
tates of theologians and refrain from the wast-
ing of potential life. The germ cells of the
woman, though immeasurably less numerous
126 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
than the male germ cells (the spermatozoa), yet
develop uselessly over and over again in every
celibate as well as in every married woman.
And myriads of sperm cells are destroyed even
in the process of the act which does ensure fer-
tilization of the woman by the single favored
spermatozoön. If the theologians really mean
what they say, and demand the voluntary ef-
fort of complete celibacy from all men, save
for the purpose of procreation, this will not
achieve their end of preventing the wastage
of all potential life; and the monthly loss of
unfertilized ova by women is beyond all the ef-
forts of the will to curb. Nature, not man, ar-
ranged the wastage of potential life against
which ascetic bishops rage.
If, then, throughout the greater part of their
lives the germinal cells of both sexes inevitably
disintegrate without creating an embryo, there
can be nothing wrong in selecting the most fa-
vorable moment possible for the conception of
a new life. ->
What generally happens in marriage where
this is not thought of is that one of the very
earliest unions results in the fertilization of the
wife, so that the young pair have a baby nine
months, or a little more, after marriage.
i
CHILDREN 127
Whereas, were they wise and did they real-
ize the full significance of what they were doing,
they would allow at least six months or a year
to elapse before beginning the supreme task of
their lives, the burden of which falls mainly
upon the woman.
For many reasons it is more ideal to have
the children spontaneously and early; but if
economic conditions are hard, as they so often
are in “civilized” life, it may be better to marry
and defer the children rather than not to marry.
If the pair married very young, and before.
they could afford to support children, they
might wait several years with advantage. An
exceptional case is one of the happiest mar-
riages I know. The pair married while they
were young students in the University, and
fourteen years later they had their first child,
a splendidly healthy boy. Though such a long
interval is certainly not to be universally recom-
mended, as it is said that it may result in steril-
ity [preventive measures in themselves never
lead to sterility. W. J. R.], in this instance it
was triumphantly better for the two to have
lived normally satisfied happy lives than to have
waited for fourteen years, and risked the man's
“fall.” f
128 LovE IN MARRIAGE
There are many reasons, both for their own
and for the child's sake, why the potential par-
ents should take the wise precaution of delay,
unless owing to special circumstances they can-
not expect to live together uninterruptedly.
The child, conceived in rapture and hope,
should be given every material chance which
the wisdom and love of the parents can devise.
And the first and most vital condition of its
health is that the mother should be well and
happy and free from anxiety while she bears it.
The tremendous and far-reaching effects of
marriage on the woman's whole organism make
her less fitted to bear a child at the very com-
mencement of marriage than later on when the
system will have adjusted itself to its new con-
ditions and she will have regained her poise and
normal health.
Not only for the sake of the child, however,
should the first conception be a little delayed,
but also to secure the lasting happiness of the
married lovers. It is generally (though per-
haps not always) wise thoroughly to establish
their relation to each other before introducing
the inevitable dislocation and readjustment ne-
cessitated by the wife's pregnancy and the birth
of a child.
CHILDREN 129
In this book I am not speaking so much of the
universal sex relation, as to those who find
themselves to-day in the highly civilized, arti-
ficial communities of English speaking people:
and in our present society there is little doubt
that the early birth of a child demands much
self-sacrifice and self-restraint from the man,
one of the reflex vibrations of which is his un-
definable sense of loss and separation from his
bride. . This has been confided to me by many
men who have been generous enough to trust
me with some of the secrets of their lives. Mr.
C. is typical of many others of his class.
He was quiet and refined with a strong strain
of romantic love, which was entirely centered
in his bride. He was manly and sufficiently
virile to feel the need of sex intercourse, but
he was unaware (as are so many men) of the
woman's corresponding need; and he did not
give his wife any orgasm. She took no pleasure
therefore in the physical act of union, which
for her was so incomplete. -
Very shortly after marriage she conceived,
and a child was born ten months after the wed-
ding day. . ë -
For two years after the birth of the child
her vitality was so lowered and the sex act was
*
130 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
to her so repugnant that she refused her hus-
band any union; and it was thus three years
after their marriage before they met in any-
thing like a normal way. By that time the long
separation from sex-life, and the strain on the
man, coupled with daily familiarity at home,
had dimmed, if not completely destroyed, his
sense of romance. The natural stimulation
each should exert on the other had faded, so
that they never experienced the mutual glow of
intense rapture in their sex-union.
Another pair suffered similarly: Mr. and
Mrs. D. were prevented for several years by
the wife's real and fancied ill-health from hav-
ing any intercourse. When, after that time,
she recovered and passionately desired the true
marriage relation, the husband felt it to be im-
possible. To him it would have been, as he
expressed it, “like raping his sister.”
Once such a thought has grown into a maa's
mind it is very difficult “to recapture the first
early rapture.” And with the loss of that
early rapture the two lose, for the rest of their
lives, the irradiating joy which is priceless not
only for its beauty, but for the vitality with
which its wings are laden. -
On the other hand, if by waiting some months
CHILDREN 131 \
(or even years if they are young) the mated
pair have learnt to adjust themselves to each
other and have experienced the full and su-
preme rapture of complete love-making, the
disturbance which is caused by the birth of the
child is in no sense a danger to their happiness,
but is its crown and completion.
A man once said to me—one can endure any-
thing for the sake of a beloved wife. But the
wife is only utterly beloved when she and her
married lover have not only entered paradise
together, but when she fully realizes, through
insight gained by her own experiences, the true
nature of that of which she is depriving her
husband so long as her bodily condition makes
sex-unions with him impossible.
Much has been written, and may be found in
the innumerable books on the sex-problems, as
to whether a man and woman should or should
not have relations while the wife is bearing an
unborn child. In this matter experience is very
various, so that it is difficult or impossible to
give definite advice without knowing the full
circumstances of each case.
When, however, we observe the admirable
sanctity of the pregnant females of the wood-
land creatures, and when we consider the ex-
132 IOVE IN MARRIAGE
traordinary ignorance and disregard of wom-
an’s needs which mark so many of our modern
customs, we cannot but think that the safe side
of this debatable question must be in the com-
plete continence of the woman for at least six
months before the birth of the child. I have
heard from a number of women, however, that
they desire union urgently at this time, and
from others that the thought of it is incredible.
[To demand complete continence for at least
six months before the child is born is entirely
too severe a requirement. As a woman should
for several reasons wait six weeks or two.
months after the birth of the child before re-
suming sex relations, it follows that with each
pregnancy the husband would have to be absti-
nent for a period of about eight months. Such
complete abstinence would be for some hus-
bands difficult, for some unbearable. For some
it might result in very unpleasant complica-
tions. Nor is it so easy for all wives during
the acme of their sex lives to abstinent for
eight months, especially if we bear in mind that
with some women the sex-urge is extremely in-
sistent during pregnancy. No, such abstinence
is unnecessary. Six weeks to two months of
abstinence before and the same period after the
CHILDREN 133
birth of a child is quite sufficient, and proper,
and will not injure husband, wife or child.-See
Chapter: Intercourse During Pregnancy in the
Editor’s “Women—Her Sex and Love Life.”
W. J. R.]
Tolstoy strongly condemned any sex-contact
while the wife was pregnant or nursing and
blamed the husband who “puts upon her the
unbearable burden of being at one and the same
time a mistress, an exhausted mother, and a
sickly, irritable, hysterical individual. And the
husband loves her as his mistress, ignores her
… as a mother, and hates her for the irritability
and hysteria which he himself has produced and
produces.” His view is taken by many of our
noblest men.
While the wife feels that she cannot allow her
husband to enter the portals of her body when it
has become the sacred temple of a developing
life, she should also consider the perpetual
strain which nature imposes upon him; and the
tender and loving wife will readily find some
means of giving him that physical relief which
his nature needs. *
The exquisite unselfish tenderness which is
aroused in a man by the sense of mental and
spiritual harmony with a wife who sympathizes
134 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
with, because she understands his needs, is one
of the loveliest things in marriage. A wife
who knows how to waken this tenderness in a
man raises him out of the self-centered slough
in which so many men wallow unhappily.
With an ardent man, wholly devoted to his
wife and long deprived of her, the time will
come when it will be sufficient for him to be
near her and caress her for relief to take place
without any physical connection, if, as every
wife should, she has retained after marriage
that dainty modesty which renders the sight of
her bosom and of her beauty a privilege and a
joy to her husband.
After the birth of the first child the health
of the mother and of the baby both demand that
there should be no hurried beginning of a sec-
ond. At least a year should pass before the
second little life is allowed to begin its unfold-
ing, so that a minimum of about two years
should elapse before the second child is born.
The importance of this, both for the mother
and for the child, is generally adequately rec-
ognized by medical specialists, and some distin-
guished gynecologists advocate as much as three
or five years between the births of successive
children. While in the whole human relation
CHILDREN 135
there is no slavery or torture so horrible as co-
erced, unwilling motherhood, there is no joy and
pride greater than that of a woman who is bear-
ing the developing child of a man she adores.
It is a serious reflection on our poisoned “civili-
zation” that a pregnant woman should feel
shame to appear in the streets. Never will the
race reach true health till it is cured of its
prurient sickness, and the prospective mother
can carry her sacred burden as a priestess in a
triumphal procession.
Of the innumerable problems which touch
upon the qualities transmitted to the children
by their parents, the study of which may be cov-
ered by the general term Eugenics, I shall here
say nothing: nor shall I deal with the problems
of birth and child-rearing. Many writers have
considered these subjects, and my purpose in
this book is to present aspects of sex-life which
have been more or less neglected by others.
While throughout I have omitted the consid-
eration of abnormalities, there is one condition
, which verges on the abnormal but yet touches
the lives of some married people who are indi-
vidually both normal and healthy, about which
a few words need to be said.
It not infrequently happens that two healthy
136 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
loving people, for no apparent reason, seem un-
able to have a child.
The old-fashioned view was that the fault lay
with the woman, and the reproach of being a
barren woman is one which has brought untold
anguish to many hearts. It is now beginning
to be recognized, however, that in a childless
union, the “fault,” if fault it be, is as often
the man's as the woman's, particularly where
the husband is a brain worker in a city.
Though it is natural that there should not be
the same joy for the pair in a child which had
not arisen from their own supreme fusion,
nevertheless, the man who is generous and
broad-minded might find much joy in a child
of his wife's, were the obtaining of this child
not coupled with the yielding of her body to
the embrace of another man, which is so gen-
erally and naturally repugnant to a husband.
"Nevertheless, now that women have been suc-
cessfully impregnanted by means of injected
semen, a new possibility has arisen for any in-
dividual pair who are childless and who long
for a little one.” Where the injection is under-
*This was done by the famous Dr. Hunter at the end of
the eighteenth century, and since then various doctors have
employed this method. An aecount of some eases is given by
{
CHILDREN 137
täken by a woman doctor, the husband need
have no feeling that his wife has been violated.
And while it is not certain that this method
would succeed in giving the child she longs for
to the woman, yet there are sufficient records
in the medical profession of successful artificial
insemination for it to offer much hope to a pair
who have been denied perfectly normal parent-
hood either through the husband's actual steril-
ity or the lack of mutual adjustment in their
organs, or from an ill-understood lack of chemi-
cal affinity.
While in such an event the husband would
have no bodily part in the heritage of this child,
*—º. in the creation of its spirit he could play a
profound part, the potentialities of which ap-
- pear to be almost unrecognized by humanity.
[I regret having to disillusion the reader on
the subject of artificial impregnation. Many
attempts at artificial impregnation of the hu-
man female have been made, but the successes
have been so few and far between, that the
method is never likely to acquire a great vogue.
For some centuries to come we will have to
depend upon the old-fashioned natural meth-
Heape in the Prºceedings of the Royal Society, 1897; see also
Marshall's text book of “Physiology of Reproduction,” 1919.
138 LOVE IN MARRIAGE)
od for the perpetuation of the human race.
W. J. R.]
The idea that the soul and character of the
child can be in any degree influenced by the
mental status of the mother during the months
of its development as an embryo within her
body, is apt to be greeted with pure skepticism
—for it is difficult of proof, and repugnant to
the male intellect, now accustomed to explain
life in terms of chemistry.
Yet all the wisest mothers whom I know vary
only in the degree of their belief in this power
of the mother. All are agreed in believing that
the spiritual and mental condition and environ-
ment of the mother does profoundly affect the
character and the mental and spiritual powers
of the child. d #
An interesting fact which strengthens the
woman's point of view, is quoted (though not
in this connection) by Marshall,” who says: “It
has been found that immunity from disease may
be acquired by young animals being suckled by
a female which had previously become immune,
the antibody to the disease being absorbed in
the ingested milk.” This particular fact is ex-
plainable in terms of chemistry: but it seems to
***The Physiology of Reproduction,” 1910, p. 566.
CHILDREN 139
me more than rash for any one in these days of
hormones from ductless glands, to deny the pos-
sibility of mental states in the mother generat-
ing “chemical messengers” which may impress
permanent characters in the physiological re-
actions of the developing child. Ellis says
(“Sex and Society”), “The mother is the child’s
supreme parent, and during the period from
conception to birth the hygiene of the future
man can only be affected by influences which
work through her.”
And Alfred Russel Wallace, the great natu-
ralist, thought the transmission of mental in-
fluence neither impossible nor even very improb-
able.” I am convinced that it takes place all the
time, molding and influencing the hereditary
factors.
Hence I suggest that the husband who is de-
prived of normal fatherhood may yet make the
child of his wife's body partly his own, if his
thoughts are with her intensely, supportingly
and joyously throughout the whole time of the
unborn baby’s growth. If he reads to her, plays
beautiful music or takes her to hear it, and gives
her the very best of his thoughts and aspira-
tions, mystical though the conclusion may seem,
***Nature,” 1893, August 24, pp. 389 and 390.
140 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
he does attain an actual measure of fatherhood.
The converse, where the wife is really bar-
ren and the husband capable of having children
with another woman, is a much more difficult
problem. Then the attainment of children by
the man is impossible without the collaboration
of another woman in a manner not recognized
by our laws and customs. Even if this is done,
it is clear that to introduce the child of another
woman into the home is demanding a much
greater self-abnegation from the wife than is
demanded from the husband in the situation we
have just considered.
Many people whose ideals are very noble are
yet strangely incapable of adapting the material
facts of life to the real fulfillment of their ideals.
Thus there is a section of our community which
insists that there should be no restriction what-
ever of the number of children born to married
people. They think any birth control immoral.
They take their stand upon the statement that
we have no right to destroy potential life. But
if they would study a little human or animal
physiology they would find that not only every
celibate, but also every married man incessantly
and unavoidably wastes myriads of germs which
had the potentiality of fusion with an ovum, and
CHILDREN 141
consequently could have produced a child had
opportunity been given them. For the supposed
sake of one or two of these myriad sperma-
tozoa which must naturally and inevitably die,
they encourage the production of babies in
rapid succession, which are weakened by their
proximity, while they might have been sturdy
and healthy, had they been conceived further
apart from each other.
Such people, while awake to the claims of the
unborn, nay even of the unconceived, are blind
to the claims of the one who should be dearest
of all to the husband, and for whose health and
happiness he is responsible. A man swayed by
such pseudo-religious ignorance will allow his
wife to bear and bring forth an infant annually.
Save where the woman is exceptional, each child
following so rapidly on its predecessor, saps
and divides the vital strength which is avail-
able for the making of the offspring. This
generally lowers the vitality of each succeed-
ing child, and surely even if slowly, may mur-
der the woman who bears them.
Of course the effects of this strain upon the
woman vary greatly according to her original
health and vitality, the conditions of her sur-
roundings and the intensity of the family's
142 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
struggle for food. A half-starved mother try-
ing to bring up children in the foul air of city
slums, loses, as a rule, far more of her family
than a comfortable and well-fed woman in the
country. Nevertheless, conditions are not every-
thing; under the best conditions the chances of
death of the later children of a large family,
which comes rapidly, are far greater than for
the earlier children. -
Dr. Ploetz found that while the death rate of
first born infants is about 220 per thousand,
the death rate of the seventh born is about 330,
and of the twelfth born is 597 per thousand. So
that when “nature” has its way, and twelve
children come to sap a woman's vitality, so lit-
tle strength has she that nearly 60 per cent. of
these later ones die. What a waste of vitality!
What a hideous orgy of agony for the mothers
to produce in anguish death-doomed, suffering
infants! .
Forel (“The Sexual Question”) says: “It
seems almost incredible that in some countries
medical men who are not ashamed to throw
young men into the arms of prostitution, blush
when mention is made of anti-conceptional
methods. This false modesty, created by cus-
tom and prejudice, waxes indignant at innocent
CHILDREN 143
things while it encourages the greatest infa-
mies.” -
It is important to observe that Holland, the
country which takes most care that children
shall be well and voluntarily conceived, has in-
creased its survival-rate and has thereby not
diminished but increased its population, and has
the lowest infant mortality in Europe. While in
America, where the outrageous “Comstock
Laws” confuse wise scientific prevention with
illegal abortion and label them both as “ob.
scene,” thus preventing people from obtaining
decent hygienic knowledge, horrible and crim.
inal abortion is more frequent than in any other
country.
It should be realized that all the proper, medi-
cal methods of preventing undesired pregnancy
consists, not in destroying an already growing
embryo, but in preventing the male semen from
reaching the unfertilized egg cell. This may be
done either by shutting the semen away from
the opening of the womb, or by securing the
death of all (instead of the natural death of all
but one) of the two or three hundred million
spermatozoa which enter the woman. Even
when a child is allowed to grow in its mother,
all these hundreds of millions of spermatozoa
144 LOVE, IN MARRIAGE
are inevitably and naturally destroyed every
time the man has an emission; and to add one
more to these millions sacrificed by nature is
surely no crime! To render inert the ejaculated
spermatozoa which would otherwise die and de-
compose naturally is a simple matter, now fa-
miliar to every intelligent physician and lay-
man. The knowledge is easily obtainable.
To those who protest that we have no right to
interfere with the course of nature, one must
point out that the whole of civilization, every-
thing which separates man from the animals,
is an interference with what such people com-
monly call “nature.” s
Nothing in the cosmos can be against nature
for it all forms part of the great processes of
the universe. - >
Actions differ, however, in their relative po-
sitions in the scale of things. Only those ac-
tions are worthy which lead the race onwards
to a higher and fuller completion and the per-
fecting of its powers, which steer the race into
the main current of that stream of life and vi-
tality which courses through us and impels us
forward. ^
It is the sacred duty of all who dare to hand
on the awe-inspiring gift of life, to hand it on
CHILDREN 145
in a vessel as fit and perfect as they can fashion,
so that the body may be the strongest and most
beautiful instrument possible in the service of
the soul they summon to play its part in the
mystery of material being. -
CHAPTER X
SOCIETY
“Leve is fed not by what it takes, but by what it gives, and
that excellent dual love of man and wife must be fed also by
the love they give to others.”—Epward CARPENTEs.
MAN, even the commonplace modern man, is
romantic. He craves consciously or uncon-
sciously for the freedom, the beauty, and the
adventure which his forefathers found in their
virgin forests. This craving, transmuted,
changed out of recognition by civilized life and
modern conditions, is yet a factor not to be
ignored in the relationship of the sexes.
The “bonds of matrimony” so often referred
to with ribald laughter, touch, and perhaps se-
cretly gall, even the most romantic and devoted
husband. If to the sincere and friendly ques-
tion, “What is most difficult in married life
for the man?” one should get a sincere answer
—that answer would be summed up in the
words: “Perpetual propinquity.”
Of this, the wife, particularly if she be really
146
SOCIETY: 147
in love, is seldom fully aware. If her husband
is her true lover, his tenderness and real devo-
tion will give him the wit to conceal it. But
though by concealment he may preserve the un-
ruffled surface of their happiness, yet the long-
ing to be roving is not completely extinguished.
In the true lover this unspoken and unconscious
longing is perhaps less a desire to set out upon
a fresh journey, than a longing to experience
again the exquisite joy of the return: to re-live
the magic charm of the approach to the spot in
which the loved one is living her life, into the
sacred separateness of which the lover breaks
and, like the Prince by his kiss, to stir her to
fresh activity. - *
As will be realized by those who have under-
stood the preceding chapters, each coming to-
gether of man and wife, even if they have been
mated for many years, should be a fresh adven-
ture; each winning should necessitate a fresh
wooing.
Yet what a man often finds so hard, is to come
to that wooing with full ardor and with that
complete sense of romance which alone can ren-
der it utterly delightful, if the woman he is to
woo has been in a too uninterrupted and pro-
saic relation with him in the meantime.
148 LovE IN MARBLAGE
Most men, of course, have their businesses
apart from their homes, but in the home lives
of the great mass of middle-class people, the
Victorian tradition still too largely preponder-
ates, and the mated pair bore each other to
death during the daily routine. |
To a very thoughtful couple of my acquaint-
ance, the sense of romantic joy in one another
was so precious that they endeavored to per-
petuate it by living in different houses.
Such a measure, however, is not likely to suit
many people, particularly where there are chil-
dren. Yet even without bodily separation (which
must always entail expense) or any measure of
freedom not at every one's command, much can
be done to retain that sense of spiritual freedom
in which alone the full joy of loving union can
be experienced. . r -
But even intellectual and spiritual freedom is
often rendered impossible in present-day mar-
riage. •
The beautiful desire for ideal unity which is
so strong in most hearts, is perhaps the original
cause of one of the most deadening features in
many marriages. In the endeavor to attain the
ideal unity, one partner consciously or uncon-
sciously imposes his or her will and opinions
SOCIETY, 149
upon the other partner, and then upon the chil-
dren as they grow up.
The typical self-opinionated male which this
course develops, while a subject for laughter
in plays and novels, a laughter which hastens
his extermination, is yet by no means extinct.
In his less exaggerated form such a man may
often be an idealist, but he is essentially an
idealist of narrow vision. The peace, the unity,
for which he craves is superficially attained; but
it takes acuter eyes than his to see that it is
attained not by harmonious intermingling, but
by super-position and destruction.
I have known a romantic man of this type,
apparently unaware that he was encroaching
upon his wife's personality, who yet endeavored
not only to choose her books and her friends
for her, but “prohibited” her from buying the
daily newspaper to which she had been accus-
tomed for years before her marriage, saying
that one newspaper was enough for them both,
and blandly ignoring the fact that he took it
with him out of the house before she had an
opportunity of reading it. This man posed to
himself more successfully than to others, not
only as a romantic man, but as a model hus-
band; and he reproached his wife for jeopardiz-
150 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
ing their perfect unity whenever she accepted
an invitation in which he was not included.
On the other hand, in homes where the avowed
desire is for the modern freedom of intellectual
life for both partners, there is very frequently
a bickering, a sense of disharmony and unrest
that dispels the peace and the air of restful se-
curity which is an essential feature of a true
home.
It is one of the most difficult things in the
world for two people of different opinions to re-
tain their own opinions without each endeavor-
ing to convert or coerce the other, and at the
same time to feel the same tender trust in the
judgment of the other that each would have felt
had they agreed.
It takes a generous and beautiful heart to see
beauty and dignity in the attitude of a mate who
is looking at the other side of a vital question.
But the very fact that it does take a beautiful
and generous heart to do this thing proves it
well worth the doing.
If the easier way is chosen and the two mu-
tually conceal their views when they differ, or
the stronger partner coerces the weaker into
hiding those traits which give personality to an
individual, the result is an impoverishing of
SOCIETY 151
both, and through that very fact, an impover-
ishment, a lowering of the love which both
sought to serve.
In marriage each one dreams that he will find
the Understander—the one from whom he may
set out into the world in search of treasures of
knowledge and experience, and before whom the
spoils may be exhibited without thought of ri-
valry, and with the certainty of glad apprisal.
Treasures, dear to our own hearts but of no
value to others, should here find appreciation,
and here the tender super-sensitive germ of an
idea may be watered and tended till its ripe
beauty is ready to burst upon the world.
As marriage is at present, such tenderness
and such stimulating appreciation is much more
likely to come from the woman to the man and
his work than from the man to the woman.
. For too long have men been accustomed to look
upon woman's views, and in particular on herº
intellectual opinions, as being something de-
manding at the most a bland humoring beneath
the kindest of smiles.
Even from the noblest man, the woman of
sensitive personality to-day feels an undercur-
rent as of surprised congratulation when she
has anything to say worth his serious attention
152 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
outside that department of life supposed to be-
long to her “sphere.” Thus man robs his
wedded self of a greatness which the dual unity
might reach.
But in marriage the mutual freedom and re-
spect for opinions, vitally important though
they be, are not sufficient for the full develop-
ment of character. Life demands ever widening
interests. Owing partly to the differentiation
of many types of individuals due to the special-
ization of civilization, and partly to the trans-
mutation of his old vagrant instinct, man in-
creasingly desires to touch and to realize the
lives of his fellows: In the lives of others our
hearts and understandings may find perpetual
adventures into the new and strange.
Individual human beings, even the noblest
and most complex yet evolved, have but a share
of the innumerable faculties of the race. Hence
even in a supremely happy, marriage, which
touches, as does the mystic in his raptures, a
realization of the whole universe, there cannot
lie the whole of life’s experience. Outside the
actual lives of the pair there must always be
many types of thought and many potentialities
which can only be realized in the lives of other
people.
SOCIETY 153
In the complete human relation friends of all
grades are needed, as well as a mate. Marriage,
however, in its present form is too often made
to curtail the enjoyment of intimate friend-
ships. The reason for this is partly the social
etiquette, which, though discarded in the high-
est levels of society, still lingers in many cir-
cles, of inviting the husband and the wife to-
gether upon all social occasions. It is true
that they are separated at the dinner table, but
they are always within the possibility of ear-
shot of each other, which very often deadens
their potentialities for being entertaining. The
mere fact of being overheard repeating some-
thing one may have already said elsewhere, is
sufficient to prevent some people from telling
their best stories, or from expressing their real
views about important matters. -
And, a still more serious barrier to joy, so
primitive, so little evolved are we even yet,
there is in most human beings a strong streak
of sex-jealousy. For either mate to be allowed
to go out uncriticized into the world, is to de-
mand, if not more than the other is willing to
give, at least a measure of trust which by its
rarity appears now-a-days as something con-
spicuously fine.
154 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
Jealousy, which is one of the most frequent
shadows cast by the light of love, is very apt to
sow a distrust in one which makes a normal
life for the other partner impossible.
It is hard to say in which sex the feeling is
more strongly developed. It takes special
forms under different circumstances, and if a
nature is predisposed towards it, it is one of the
most difficult characteristics to eradicate.
Custom, and generations of traditions, seem
to have imprinted on our race the false idea that
marital fidelity is to be strengthened by coercive
bonds. We are slowly growing out of this, and
now-a-days in most books giving advice to
young wives there is a section telling them that
a man should be allowed his men friends after
marriage.
But this is not enough. There should be com-
plete and unquestioning trust on both sides.
The man and the woman should each be free to
go, unchallenged even in thought, on solitary
excursions, or on visits, week-ends or walking
tours, without the possibility of a breath of jeal-
ousy or suspicion springing up in the heart of
the other. t
It is true that many natures are not yet ready
for such trust, and might abuse such freedom.
, \
SOCIETY 155
But the baser natures will always find a method
of gratifying their desires, and are not likely to
err more in trusted freedom than they would
inevitably have done through secret intrigues
if held in jealous bondage.
And it is only in the fresh unsullied air of
such freedom that the fullest and most perfect
love can develop. In the marriage relation it
is supremely true that only by loosening the
bonds can one bind two hearts indissolubly to-
gether.
When they are sometimes physically apart
married lovers attain the closest spiritual union.
For with sensitive spirits—and they are the
only ones who know the highest pinnacles of
love—periods of separation and solitude can be
revivifying and re-creative. -
So great is the human soul that some of its
beauty is hidden by nearness: it needs distance
between it and the beholder to be perceived in
its true perspective.
To the realization of the beauty and the enjoy-
ment of solitude, woman in general tends to be
less open than man. This, perhaps, is due to
the innumerable generations during which the
claims of her children and of domestic life have
robbed her of nature's healing gift.
156 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
Although it is merely incidental to the drama,
yet to me the most poignant thing in Synge's
beautiful play Deirdré is that she could feel
inevitable tragedy when the first thought of
something apart from herself crosses her
lover’s mind. Deirdré and her lover had been
together for seven years in an unbroken and
idyllic intimacy, and she feels that all is fin-
ished, and that her doom, the knell of their joy,
had struck, when for the first time she perceived
in him a half-formed thought of an occupation
apart from her.
This ancient weakness of our sex must be
conquered, and is being conquered by the mod-
era. WOLT1811. * *
While modern marriage is tending to give
ever more and more freedom to each of the part-
ners, there is at the same time a unity of work
and interest growing up which brings them to-
gether on a higher plane than the purely do-
mestic one which was so confining to the women
and so dull to the men. Every year one sees a
widening of the independence and the range of
the pursuits of women: but still, far too often,
marriage puts an end to woman's intellectual
life. Marriage can never reach its full stature
until women possess as much intellectual free-
SOCIETY 157
dom and freedom of opportunity within it as
do their partners. -
That at present the majority of women
neither desire freedom for creative work, nor
would know how to use it, is only a sign that we
are still living in the shadow of the coercive
and dwarfing influences of the past.
In an interesting article on woman's intellec-
tual work, W. J. Thomas (“Sex and Society”)
says: “The American woman, with the enjoy-
ment of greater liberty has made an approach
toward the standards of professional scholar-
ship, and some individuals stand at the very
top in their university studies and examina-
tions. The trouble with these cases is that they
are either swept away and engulfed by the mod-
ern system of marriage, or find themselves ex-
cluded in some intangible way from association
with men in the fullest sense, and no career is
open to their talents.” “
He sees clearly that this is but a passing
phase in the development of our society, and he
advocates a wider scope for the play of married
women's powers. “The practice of an occupa-
tional activity of her own choosing, and a gen-
erous attitude towards this on the part of the
158 LovE IN MARRIAGE
man, would contribute to relieve the strain and
make marriage more frequently successful.”
When woman naturally develops the powers
latent within her, man will find at his side not
only a mate, free and strong, but a desirable
friend and an intellectual comrade.
The desire for freedom, both for physical and
mental exploration and for experiences outside
the sacred enclosure of the home, may at first
sight appear to be conflicting and entirely in-
compatible with the ideal of closer and more
perfect unity between the married pair. But
this conflict is only apparent, though it is true
that most writers have failed to realize this.
Consequently, in some sections of the writing
and teaching of the “advanced” schools, there
are claims only for increased freedom—a free-
dom to wander at will—a freedom in which the
wanderer does not return to his fixed center.
On the other hand there are those who real-
ize principally the beauty of married unity, and,
concentrating on the demand for the unity and
extremest chastity on the part of the married
pair, are very apt to ignore the enriching flow
of a wide life’s experiences. They try to dam
up the fertilizing tide of life, and thus, though
they are unconscious of what they are doing,
SOCIETY 159
they tend to reduce the richness and beauty of
marriage. -
It is for the young people of the new genera-
tion to realize that the two currents of longing
which spring up within them—the longing for
a full life-experience, and the longing for a
close union with a life-long mate—are not in-
compatible but are actually both essential parts
of the more perfect and fuller beauty of the fu-
ture that already seeks to find its expression
in their lives.
Ellen Key (“Love and Marriage”) seems to
fear the widening of the married woman’s life,
and she writes as though the aspiration to do
professional and intellectual work of a high or-
der must dwarf and sterilize the mother in the
married woman. *
She writes of a more northerly people, the
Scandinavians, and it may be true of her coun-
try-women, I do not know. But it is not essen-
tially and universally true. I am writing of
the English-speaking races of to-day, and
though we also have among us that dwarfed
and sterilized type of woman, she forms in our
community a dwindling minority. The major-
ity of our best women enter marriage and
motherhood, or else long for a marriage more
160 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
beautiful than the warped mockery of it that
is offered them.
As Mrs. Gilman says (“Women and Eco-
nomics”):
“In the primal physical functions of maternity
the human female cannot show that her supposed
specialization to these uses has improved her fulfil-
ment of them, rather the opposite. The more freely
the human mother mingles in the natural industries of
a human creature, as in the case of the savage woman,
the peasant woman, the working woman everywhere
who is not overworked, the more rightly she fulfills
these functions. The more absolutely the woman is
segregated to sex-functions only, eut off from all
economic use and made wholly dependent on the sex-
relation as means of a livelihood, the more patho-
logical does her motherhood become. The over-de-
velopment of sex caused by her economic dependence
on the male reacts unfavorably on her essential duties.
She is too female for the perfect motherhood l’’
The majority of our young women, I am con-
vinced, have in them the potentiality of a full
and perfected love. So, too, have the majority
of our young men. For the best type of young
man to-day is tired of polygamy, he has seen
enough in his father's and his friends’ lives of
the weariness of the sinister, secret polygamy,
SOCIETY 161
that hides itself and rots the race under the pro-
tecting cloak of the supposed monogamy of our
social system.
But as things are at present in England and
in America, the young man who marries, how-
ever much he may be in love, is generally too
ignorant (as has been indicated in the preced-
ing chapters) to give his wife real physical de-
light. Then, sooner or later, comes the sequence
of disappointments which culminate in the long-
ing for a fresh adventure.
As one young husband said to me: “A de-
cent man can’t go on having unions with his
wife when she obviously does not enjoy them,”
and so he is forced to “go elsewhere.” “And
they call us polygamists! We are not polyg-
amists. But marriage is a rotten failure,” was
his verdict.
No. They are not polygamists, the finest
young men of the present and of the future.
Most men to-day are not in their heart of hearts
polygamists, in spite of all the outward signs
to the contrary; in spite of the fact that so few
of them have remained faithful to one woman.
But they are ignorant of the sex-laws and tra-
ditions, that sex-knowledge which was the herit-
age of much less civilized tribes, and so they
162 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
have trampled and crushed out the very thing
for the growth of which their hearts are ach-
ing.
Hence secretly (for in a marriage that is at
least superficially happy the man seldom does
this openly) the man begins to crave for an-
other type of society and he “goes elsewhere.”
Not, it is true, to find, or even in the hope of
finding, what he would get from a perfect mar-
riage; but often to satisfy in some measure that
yearning for fresh experience, for romance, and
for that sense of fusion with another is the ro-
mantic experience which, even if it is only a
delusion of the senses, is yet one of the most
precious things life has to offer.
It is hard, indeed, in many cases it seems im-
possible, for a good woman to understand what
it is that draws her husband from her. Re-
stricted by habit and convention in the exercise
of all her faculties, she is unaware of the ever ,
narrowing range of her interest and her pow-
ers of conversation. The home life tends to be-
come that of a fenced pond, instead of a great
ocean with innumerable currents. From the re-
stricted and fenced, man's instinct is ever to
escape. Man's opportunities for exploration in
the cities are few, and the loose woman is one
SOCIETY 163
of the most obvious doors of escape into new
experiences.
Women feel a so righteous and instinctive
horror of prostitution, and, regarding it, they
experience an indignation so intense that they
do not seek to understand the man's attitude.
The prostitute, however, sometimes supplies
an element which is not purely physical, and
which is often lacking in the wife's relation with
her husband, an element of charm and mutual
gayety in pleasure.
If good women realized this, while they would :
judge and endeavor to eliminate prostitution
no less strenuously, they might be in a better'
position to begin their efforts to free men from
the hold that the social evil has upon them.
It is perhaps impossible to find the begin-
ning of a vicious circle, but the first step out
of it must be the realization that one is within
it, and the realization of some, at any rate, of
, -its component parts.
Man, through prudery, through the custom of
ignoring the woman's side of marriage and con-
sidering his own whim as the marriage law,
has largely lost the art of stirring a chaste
partner to physical love. He therefore deprives
her of a glamour, the loss of which he deplores,
164 , LOVE IN MARRLAGE
for he feels a lack not only of romance and
beauty, but of something higher which is mys-
tically given as the result of the complete union.
He blames his wife’s “coldness” instead of his
own want of art. Then he seeks elsewhere for
the things she could have given him had he
known how to win them. And she, knowing that
the shrine has been desecrated, is filled with
righteous indignation, though generally as blind
as he is to the true cause of what has occurred.
Manifold and far-reaching, influencing the
whole structure of society not only in this coun-
try, but in every country and at every time,
have been the influences which have grown up
from the root-fallacy in the marriage relation.
Then there is another cause for the dulling
of a wife's bright charm. It is indeed a serious
matter, as Jean Finot says, that, “under pres-
ent conditions, the mistress keeps certain liber-
ties which are denied to married women.”
The past and its history have been studied
by many, and we may leave it. What concerns
the present generation of young married peo-
ple, is to-day and the future. The future is full
of hope. Already one sees beginning to grow
up a new relationship between the units com-
posing society. .
SOCIETY: 165
In the noblest society love will hold sway.
The love of mates will always be the supremest
life experience, but it will no longer be an ex-
perience exclusive and warped. -
The love of friends and children, of com-
rades and fellow-workers, will but serve to de-
velop every power of the two who are mates.
By mingling the greatness of their individual
stature they can achieve together something
that, had both or either been dwarfed and puny
individuals, would have remained for ever un-
attainable.
The whole trend of the evolution of human
society has been toward an increased coherence.
of all its parts, until at the present time it is
already almost possible to say that the commu-
nity has an actual life on a plane above that
of all the individuals composing it: that the
community in fact is a superentity. It is
through the community of human beings, and
not in our individual lives, that we reach an
ultimate permanence upon this globe.
When our relation to the community is fully
‘realized, it will be seen that the health, the hap-
piness, and the consequent powers of every in-
dividual, concern not only his own life, but ºfso
166 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
affect the whole community of which he is a
member.
ſ The happiness of a perfect marriage, which
enhances the joy of the private life, renders
one not only capable of adding to the stream of
the life-blood of the community in children, but
by marriage one is also rendered a fitter and
; more perfect instrument for one's own particu-
!
lar work, in the tempering and finishing of
which society plays a part, and the results of
which should be shared by society as a whole.
Thus it is the concern of the whole commu-
nity that marriage should be as perfect, and
hence as joyous, as possible; so that the pow-
ers which should be set free and created for
the purpose of the whole community should not
be frittered away in the useless longing and
disappointment engendered by ignorance, nar-
row restrictions, and low ideals.
In the world the happily mated pair should
be like a great and beautiful light; a light not
hid under a bushel, but one whose beams shine
through the lives of all around them.
CHAPTER XI
TEIE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING}
“Let knowledge grow from more to more, but more of
reverence in us dwell.”—TENNyson.
We are surrounded in this world by processes
and transmutations so amazing that were they
not taking place around us hourly they would
be scouted as impossible imaginings.
A mind must be dull and essentially lacking
in imagination which can learn without interest
or amazement for the first time that the air we
breathe, apparently so uniform in its invisible
unity, is in reality composed of two principal,
and several other, gases. The two gases, how-
ever, are but mixed as wine may be with water,
and each gas by itself is a colorless air, visually
like that mixture of the two which we call the
atmosphere.
Much greater is the miracle of the composi-
tion of water. It is made of only two gases, one
of them a component of the air we breathe, and
167
168 LOVE IN MARBLAGE
the other similarly invisible and odorless, but
far lighter. These two invisible gases when
linked in a proportion proper to their natures,
fuse and are no longer ethereal and invisible,
but precipitate in a new substance, water.
The waves of the sea with their thundering
power, the sparkling tides of the river buoy-
ing the ships, are but the transmuted resultant
of the union of two invisible gases. And this,
in its simplest terms, is a parable of the in-
finitely complex and amazing transmutations of
love.
Ellis expresses the strange mystery of one of
the physical sides of love when he says:
“What has always baffled men in the contemplation
of sexual love is the seeming inadequacy of its cause,
the immense discrepancy between the necessarily cir-
cumscribed regions of mucous membrane which is the
final goal of such love and the sea of world-embrac-
ing emotions to which it seems the door, so that, as
Remy de Gourmont has said, “the mucous membranes,
by an ineffable mystery, enclose in their obscure folds
all the riches of the infinite.” It is a mystery before
which the thinker and the artist are alike overcome.”
To me, however, the recent discoveries of
physiology seem to afford a key which may un-
THE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING 169
lock a chamber of the mystery and admit us to
one of the halls of the palace of truth. The
hormones the internal secretions of the so-called
ductless glands in each individual body pour
from one organ and affect another, and thus
influence the whole character of the individual’s
life processes. The visible secretions and the
most subtle essences which pass during union
between man and woman, affect the lives of each
and are essentially vital to each other. As I
see them, the man and the woman are each or-
gans, parts, of the other. And in the strictest
scientific, as well as in a mystical, sense they
together are a single unit, an individual en-
tity. There is a physiological as well as a
spiritual truth in the words, “they twain shall
be one flesh.”
In love it is not only that the yearning of the
bonds of affinity to be satisfied is met by the
linking with another, but that out of this union
there grows a new and unprecedented creation.
In this I am not speaking of the bodily child
which springs from the love of its parents, but
of the superphysical entity created by the per-
fect union in love of man and woman. To-
gether, united by the love bonds which hold
them, they are a new and wondrous thing sur-
170 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
passing, and different from, the arithmetical
sum of them both when separate.
So seldom has the perfection of this new
creation been experienced, that we are still far
short even of imagining its full potentialities,
but that it must have mighty powers we dimly
realize.
Youths and maidens stirred by the attraction
of love, feel hauntingly and inarticulately that
there is before them an immense and beautiful
experience: feel as though in union with the be-
loved there will be added powers of every sort
which have no measure in terms of the ordi-
nary unmated life.
These prophetic dreams, if they are not true
of each individual life, are yet true of the race
as a whole. For in the dreams of youth to-day
is a foreshadowing of the reality of the future. ,
So accustomed have we recently become to
accept one aspect of organic evolution, that we
tend to see in youth only a recapitulation of
our race's history. The well-worn phrase “On-
togeny repeats Phylogeny” has helped to con-
centrate our attention on the fact that the young
in their development, in ourselves as in the ani-
mals, go through many phases which resemble
THE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING 171
the stages through which the whole race must
have passed in the course of its evolution.
While this is true, there is another character-
istic of youth: It is propheticſ
The dreams of youth, which each young heart
expects to see fulfilled in its own life, seem so
often to fade unfulfilled. . . . But that is be-
cause the wonderful powers of youth are not
supplied with the necessary ..tool—knowledge.
And so potentialities, which could have worked
miracles are allowed to atrophy and die.
But as humanity orients itself more truly,
more and more will the knowledge and experi-
ence of the whole race be placed at the disposal
of all youth on its entry into life.
Then that glorious upspringing of the racial
ideal, which finds its expression in each un-
spoiled generation of youth, will at last meet
with a store of knowledge sufficient for its
needs, and will find ready as a tool to its hand
the accumulated and sifted wisdom of the race.
Then youth will be spared the blunders and
the pain and the unconscious self-destruction
that to-day leaves scarcely any one untouched.
In my own life, comparatively short and
therefore lacking in experience though it be, I
have known, both personally and vicariously,
172 LOVE IN MARRIAGE
so much anguish that might have been pre-
vented by timely knowledge. This impels me
not to wait till my experience and researches
are complete, and my life and vital interests
are fading, but to hand on at once those glean-
ings of wisdom I have already accumulated
which may help the race to understand itself.
Hence I conclude this little book, for, though
incomplete, it contains some of the vital things
youth should be told.
In all life activities, house-building, hunting
or any other, where intellectual and oral tra-
dition comes in, as it does with the human race,
‘‘instinct” tends to die, out. Thus the human
mother is far less able to manage her baby with-
out instruction, than is a cat her kittens; al-
though the human mother at her best, has, in
comparison with the cat, an infinitude of duties
toward, and influences over, her child.
A similar truth holds in relation to marriage.
The century-long following of various “civil-
ized” customs has not only deprived our young
people of most of the instinctive knowledge they
might have possessed, but has given rise to in-
numerable false and polluting customs. -
Though many write on the art of managing
children, few have anything to say about the art
*
THE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING 173
of marriage, save those who have some dogma,
often theological or subversive of natural law,
to proclaim.
Any fundamental truth regarding marriage is
rendered immeasurably difficult to ascertain be-
cause of the immense ranges of variety in hu-
man beings, even of the same race, many of
which result from the artificial conditions and
the unnatural stimuli so prevalent in what we
call civilization. To attempt anything like a
serious study of marriage in all its varieties
would be a monumental work. Those who have
even partially undertaken it have tended to be-
come entangled in a maze of abnormalities, so
that the needs of the normal, healthy, romantic
person have been overlooked.
Each pair, therefore, has tended to repeat the
blunders from which it might have been saved,
and to stumble blindly in a maze of difficulties
which are not the essential heritage of human-
ity, but are due to the unreasoning folly of our
present customs.
I have written this book for those who enter
marriage normally and healthily, and with op-
timism and hope.
If they learn its lessons they may be saved
from some of the pitfalls in which thousands
174 LOVE IN MARRLAGE
have wrecked their happiness, but they must
not think that they will thereby easily attain
the perfection of marriage. There are a myriad
subtleties in the adjustment of any two indi-
viduals.
Each pair must, using the tenderest and most
delicate touches, sound and test each other,
learning their way about the intricacies of each
other’s hearts.
Sometimes, with all the knowledge and the
best will in the world, two who have married
find that they cannot fuse their lives; of this
tragedy I have not here anything to say; but
ordinary unhappiness would be less frequent
than it is were the tenderness of knowledge ap-
plied to the problem of mutual adjustment from
the first day of marriage.
All the deepest and highest forces within us
impel us to evolve an ever nobler and tenderer
form of life long monogamy as our social ideal.
While the thoughtful and tender-hearted must
seek, with ever greater understanding, to ease
and comfort those who miss this joyful natural
development, reformers in their zeal for side-
issues must not forget the main growth of the
stock. The beautiful sense for love in the hearts
of the young should be encouraged, and they
THE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING 175
should have access to the knowledge of how to
cultivate it, instead of being diverted by the
clamor for “freedom” to destroy it.
Disillusioned middle age is apt to look upon
the material side of the marriage relation, to see
its solid surface in the cold, dull light of every-
day experience; while youth irradiated by the
glow of its dreams is unaware how its aerial
and celestial phantasies are broken and shat-
tered when unsuspectingly brought up against
the hard facts of physical reality.
The transmutation of material facts by celes-
tial phantasies is to some extent within the
power of humanity, even the imperfect human-
ity of to-day.
When knowledge and love go together to the
making of each marriage, the joy of that new
unit, the Pair, will reach from the physical foun-
dation of its united body to the heavens where
its head is crowned with stars.
NOTES 179
it must be remembered that my theory is new, and
every well-authenticated case for or against it will be
valuable. All communications will be treated with
the strictest confidence. -
M. C. STOPEs.
JAN 20 1919
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