Читать книгу A Plea for Monogamy - Wilfrid Lay - Страница 18

Table of Contents

The writer is aware of the unprecedented character of much that has just been said, but feels that he knows whereof he speaks, also of the revolutionary nature of the theses of the rest of this chapter in which the subsequent matter of the book is given in outline.

First, the statement that what is popularly known as romantic love has little if any significance in true marriage. For it will be maintained consistently that given a not too impossible combination of man and woman, as for example those of too widely divergent social level, any man can woo and win any woman and make her and himself supremely happy, entirely apart from the neurotic sentimentality of romanticism.

The theory that there is just one woman in the world who can make a given man a perfect wife, and vice versa, is scientifically absurd, for there is only an infinitesimal chance that these two should ever meet. Many useless tears have been shed by men and women alike over these “ships that pass in the night,” and thus frustrate what might have been supernal happiness.

Concerning the marital relation, a common sense view raised to scientific proportions, shows incontrovertibly that married happiness is a creation of the married people themselves and chiefly of the husband. More in every way depends on him than on the woman. As pointed out by Meisel-Hess the “sexual crisis” of the present day is due to the failure of the individual man to know how to play, and to play acceptably, his part in married life.

Indeed, we may go so far as to say with absolute confidence that if a Pacific liner should lose its way and ground on a desert island, the thousand or so men and women passengers, supposing they were all young and unmarried, could put their names on slips of paper in a box, and, knowing that they were doomed to remain on the island for the rest of their lives, draw lots for partners and become infinitely more happily married lovers than the average married couple in civilization and quite as happy as if they had followed conscious preference.

But the stipulation is made that the five hundred men at least must be adepts in the erotic technique.

That is to say that the real happiness of a marriage depends solely on the behaviour of the husband, consciously planned intelligent knowledge of what a real marriage implies.