Читать книгу A Plea for Monogamy - Wilfrid Lay - Страница 27

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It should not be assumed that these remarks about the honeymoon imply that all honeymoons or even any of them are failures. The failures, if such appear, are only apparent, and need not necessarily be real; for their success is always within reach of the husband who needs only knowledge and confidence. His one aim is the proper response of his wife, and that is his only needful success. If he uses intelligence and acquires knowledge (and the honeymoon is the source of his knowledge of the extent of his wife’s inhibitions, negativisms and resistances) his progress is limited only by the small amount of his love. If he has love enough, which includes a determination to win, he will succeed. And it should be remembered that a woman’s consent to marry is not her admission that she has been won, but only her consent to let the man win her thereafter, if he can.

When this control is properly assumed by the mentally and spiritually virile husband, real mutuality begins in the marital life. The husband now conquers his unavoidable initial autoerotic habit of mind and thought, and at the same time becomes a truly social being, realizing that by his own self-control alone, in the love episode, which absolutely assures his wife’s complete erotic affiliation with him, he is securing the only kind of mutuality worthy of the name.

It is obvious that this mutuality is reciprocal in a sense entirely different from any mutuality that could be attributed to the relation during the honeymoon stage. He knows now what erotically emotional effects he can produce on his wife during the love episodes, and exactly how he has produced them. Beyond any doubt whatsoever, he also knows from the most intimate experience that the production of these effects is the only real mutuality.

An effect, in the erotic sphere, produced in a husband by a wife, is one from which all truly virile men realize they gain only autoerotic pleasure. To this effect they contribute themselves nothing. In the end the wife gets nothing of the emotional catharsis which is the sine qua non of true marital living. In such circumstances the wife gives and the husband receives, certainly a gross disgrace if it be continued, a disgrace abhorred by all men. There is no mutuality in such a gift which but impoverishes the recipient.

It thus appears that in the marital relation the husband alone is the one rightly to be the giver. And his gift impoverishes neither himself nor his wife, the recipient, but paradoxically enriches both. The husband rightly gives his time, his attention, his love and thereby controls. But in order to do this he has to control himself absolutely, so as not to snatch away from both of them that of which nature has designed him to be the donor.

Mutuality requires the husband to be sure to get something, but the thing he can get is the erotic acme of his wife, and this is the only result that, to the spiritually and mentally virile husband, has any value whatever. If, on the other hand, he takes his own erotic relaxation without getting hers it is merely a half gift which he forces, or persuades, her to give him, and mutuality is out of the question.