While marriage, regardless of whatever form it may assume, has always been mentioned in this book as unavoidably related to love, we must not blink the fact that marriage and love are two absolutely different things forced into frequent association by social and economic necessity.
Love is an involuntary and compulsory craving which draws a male and a female into the closest possible union for the purpose of mutual sexual gratification, generally followed by conception and reproduction.
Marriage a Compromise. Marriage on the other hand is merely a compromise between the positive individual cravings which demand the most complete and frequent gratification of the love urge, regardless of its consequences, and the negative feeling which causes the community to shirk all possible responsibilities incurred by the individual,[Pg 316] among others, the support of pregnant or lactating females and of helpless infants.
Unless the community owns mother and child and can exploit their labor or receive their cash value (slavery system), it demands that their owner, the impregnator of the woman and procreator of the child, supply food and shelter for both.
Marriage is also a compromise between two individual cravings which may not be synchronised, as the male's desire for the female may subside before her desire for him does, or reciprocally.
Through the institution of marriage the community protects itself against new burdens directly by penalties (sentences against wife deserters or those who abandon children) and indirectly by protecting the mates against their own cravings for whose duration they are not responsible (laws against bigamy or adultery, etc.).
Considering the Artificial Character of the Marriage union, and at the same time the psychological importance of its durability as far as the mental health of the off-spring is concerned, one of the most pressing duties of the community (and one which it never performs), should be to devise all the possible ways and means whereby the sex crav[Pg 317]ings of both mates could be helped to retain their freshness and strength as long as possible.
Attractiveness an Asset. The first thought which should be forced into the minds of modern men and women is that attractiveness is a positive asset not only to woman but to man. In classic Greece, a man could not be merely good, he had to be beautiful too. By "good" the Greek meant "fit" but in the compound word which implied both qualities, kalos, beauty came first.
Cravings being awakened and kept alive by certain fetishes, the individual should be trained to recognize his and his mate's fetishism and to make all possible efforts to retain, if necessary by artificial means, the fetishes which lead to the awakening of erotism between him and his mate.
The Average Man or Woman of Forty is a Sorry Sight. Yet a little intelligence would compel them to retain or regain the physical idiosyncrasies they exhibited at the time of their marriage.
Too many women consider it sinful to devote much time to their physical appearance and the care of their body. In a man, any attempt to make himself attractive is considered in stupid middle-class circles as a stigma of effeminacy.
[Pg 318]
The "pretty" man has always been despised by men and women, and endocrinology has confirmed their judgment by revealing to us that he is a glandular weakling. Between the pretty man and the attractive man, however, there is a far cry.
While the American movies, generally speaking, are catering to the weak-minded and the unimaginative, they have, in their search for a bait where-with to catch audiences, rendered mankind a signal service by starring the kind of man which would have passed muster in ancient Greece, beautiful and fit.
Athletic, if not Acrobatic, Movie Idols present to the female part of the audience a complex of physical qualities which women will gradually demand from their mates. It is regrettable that women should not attend prize fights in large numbers, for the sight of the godlike participants in those affrays would force them to institute enlightening comparisons between professional fighters and the average male.
Besides retaining or regaining their fetishes, human beings should make a special effort not to let those fetishes lose their power.
The Worst Foe of Married Happiness. Balzac in his "Physiology of Marriage" says that the[Pg 319] married have to wage a constant fight with a monster which devours everything: Habit. Every stimulus, as we know, pleasant or unpleasant, loses its power when applied continuously or too frequently.
It is only for the first minute or so that the ice cold shower causes our naked skin to tingle with excitement. As soon as the reaction sets in and the capillaries fill with red blood, the pleasant sensation of the water needles becomes dulled.
After holding our hand for a minute in hot water, we no longer realise the high temperature of the liquid and in order to continue to experience the feeling of heat we must continually raise the temperature of the water.
And likewise we may grow so accustomed to one source of erotic stimulation that we become indifferent to it.
Friendship May Survive the Death of Sexual Love, provided the sex desire has died in both mates at the same time. When desire dies off in the wife first and is not replaced by aversion, the situation may be very simple for she can still satisfy her more ardent mate and derive some gratification therefrom.
When the man's desire dies first, on the other[Pg 320] hand, there may arise unpleasant complications. A man may be impotent with a woman whom he loves tenderly but no longer desires sexually and yet be potent with some other woman to whom he is not completely "accustomed."
Jealousy on the part of the wife may then prevent the advent of the platonic friendship which is not uncommon between old married mates, altho Montaigne denies the possibility of its existence.
Modern mates, conscious of that danger, have now and then devised ways and means to combat Balzac's monster.
Not so long ago a well-known woman writer announced that she was planning to marry a certain man with whom, however, she did not intend to live day after day. The experiment has many chances of success if jealousy does not complicate the situation.
I suggested to reporters last summer, when two famous artists parted company, that their union might have been of longer duration if one of them had lived at the Plaza while the other was stopping at the St. Regis.
[Pg 321]
Married People Should Separate for Periods of Variable Duration in order that a fresh stimulation may emanate from their fetishes when they meet again. By leading more individual lives and having separate sets of friends, they would, besides, bring to each other a new sort of mental pabulum and stimulation day after day. Conversation becomes futile and unnecessary between a husband and wife who always pay and receive calls together, attend the same spectacles and hence always see the same side of life. Now and then we read of couples who separate and a few years later remarry. Those few years spent apart from each other mean for both new experiences which enrich their mind and their conversation and make them again interesting to each other.
The Play Function of Love. Another factor which the monstrous hypocrisy of puritanism makes very difficult to discuss openly and honestly and which wrecks many promising unions is the ignorance, more common than we suspect among married couples, of what Maurice Parmelee in his "Personality and Behavior" has called the Play Function of Love, a term which has been given a broader meaning by Havelock Ellis in an article for the Medical Review of Reviews for March 1921.
The average man or woman is tragically ignorant of the mission of sex.
The average man, as Ellis writes, has two aims:[Pg 322] "to prove that he is a man and to relieve a sexual tension.
"He too often considers himself, from traditional habits, as the active partner in love and his own pleasure as the prime motive of the sex communion............