Читать книгу A Plea for Monogamy - Wilfrid Lay - Страница 23

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In the sense of the universal and eternal feminine charm being exerted upon the primordial masculine, love is always love at first sight. But the reason that love at first sight becomes hate at second or closer sight is just this inability of the man to play the truly virile part. What has charmed him at first sight no longer charms him simply because all charm exerted upon him produces in him the autoerotic mental reaction. Only the first sight should produce that result. If the second look is not accompanied by the desire to dominate and to explore the depths of the soul behind that face, it is the look not of a virile man but of an autoerotic boy. And the boy goes on being charmed by the face; or stops being charmed and is antagonized. She will antagonize him actively and positively, of course, if, in due season, she does not sense in him the virile action. With her hostility aroused by this unconscious sense of his weakness felt by her, he is disgusted naturally and looks for another face.

The modern hologamous marriage is the creative work of a virile man, a work that, as do all vital things, needs constantly to be kept up. No overgrown boy will be able to accomplish this virile work, for being mostly brought up by women, he will not know what is the real work of virile man in marriage.

The marriages that run down, those in which the egoistic-social or material impulses gain the ascendancy over the erotic or spiritual impulses, are the marriages of autoerotic boys, not of virile men.

Psychic virility of the husband in the marital relation is the only factor that can insure the permanence, except superficially, of any marriage. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”

There should be alteration in love, but it should be caused by the progressive development of the husband’s love. This is the theory of relativity applied in the erotic sphere. Love should not alter when—that is, because—it finds alteration; but it should make changes in the reactions of the wife, so that each year finds the married lovers more completely fused physically and spiritually than the year before.

From the woman’s point of view, she is invited by marriage to a banquet, at which she may reasonably expect to find a variety of comestibles all of adult characteristics. If at this banquet she is served by her husband only with milk or pap she is rightly revolted, and will not eat. Milk alternating with pap in successive courses of marital banquet would be cruelty and adequate cause for separation, if their exclusive presence could be attributed to the voluntarily malevolent choice of the husband. But in most cases it is merely his ignorance for which his parents and teachers are the blameless cause.