Читать книгу A Plea for Monogamy - Wilfrid Lay - Страница 25

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Mutuality

In the minds of young lovers no doubt exists that their love should be mutual. The doubt comes later in their married life that possibly some impediment either existed in a latent state before they were married and has developed since, so that they ceased to be mutual; or, not previously existing, was developed by some factor in their later married life unforeseen in their earlier days and therefore impossible to avoid.

In the creation and maintenance of mutuality in the early married life the young husband is the only one concerned. If there is real mutuality caused by a perfect response in his bride, he can maintain it only if he knows how he has gained it. If it was gained by merely instinctive actions on his own part, and if he is impressed by the beauty of the mystery, and repeats to himself how wonderful it is, and how inexplicable to have so warm a response, he will not have a good chance of continuing it. He will have to do what he has not yet done. Consciously, and purposefully, he will observe his wife’s reactions during the entirety of the love episode; that is, from the beginning of one quite through to the beginning of the next one, not merely the period of the highest level of erotic excitement.

It is the privilege of woman to remain autoerotic in her reactions. She may or may not rise to allerotic action during her entire life. But man can never succeed in the marital life if he remains autoerotic. His first reactions to the marital situation are necessarily autoerotic. He cannot avoid that. His previous experience with women, if any, and particularly with prostitutes, gives him at first little if any opportunity to be with his wife other than essentially autoerotic in his reactions. A man’s first experience of a woman in an attempt at a love episode is invariably a bath of absolutely new sensations, a plunge into a sea of diverse stimuli, a medium in which many men flounder for the remainder of their lives, gaining each time no more than an uncoördinated congeries of external excitement in which they act in no controlling manner. Such men never mate a woman in the highest sense. They only supply her with a child in the guise of a husband. There is no mutuality between the surf and the bather who is helplessly tossed about in the breakers and is finally washed up on the shore and left breathless by his contact with the countless laughter of the sea.

Mutuality in the love episode depends solely on the husband’s ability to control the situation. There is no real mutuality in a relation where the wife is merely a dispenser of physical delights to a husband that neither knows nor cares what he himself contributes to the situation, who immerses himself totally in his own sensations. He is deaf, blind and otherwise anesthetic to what he himself can accomplish in the line of studied and foreplanned effects of his own, self-initiated (not merely instinctive and automatic reflex) actions upon his wife. True, there are many women who expect no more of a man than just this automatic autoerotism. But, sooner or later, even though unconsciously, they perceive a lack of “some amorous rite or other” and their own passion cools, if it has had any warmth. There is no mutuality here.