MARRIED LOVE 
OR 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE MARRIED LOVE 
OR 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
BY 
MARIE CARMICHAEL STOPES, Sc.D., Ph.D. 
DOCTOR OF SCIENCE, LONDON, DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY MUNICH; 
FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COL . U KJ| FELLOW OF 
THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF , AND THE 
LINNEAN SOCIETY, LC . DON 
With Preface and Notes, bt 
WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D. 
SECOND EDITION 
1918 
THE CRITIC AND GUIDE COMPANY 
12 MT. MORRIS PARK WEST 
NEW YORK Copyright, 1318, 
By The Cbitic & Goide Ctt DEDICATED TO 
YOUNG HUSBANDS, AND ALL THOSE 
WHO ARE BETROTHED IN LOVE CONTENTS 
PAGE 
Editor’s Preface 7 
Author’s Preface 11 
CflAPTEB 
I. The Heart’s Desire 17 
II. The Broken Joy 26 
III. Woman’s “Contrariness” 36 
IV. The Fundamental Pulse 53 
V. Mutual Adjustment 71 
VI. Sleep 94 
VII. Modesty and Romance 109 
VIII, Abstinence 116 
IX. Children 123 
X. Society 146 
XI. The Glorious Unfolding 167 INTRODUCTION 
The truly monogamic couple, where the man 
and the woman go chaste to the marriage-bed, 
and go through life in mutual love and respect, 
these feelings growing stronger as the years go 
by, finding full satisfaction in each other, with- 
out any desire for any other man or woman— 
what nobler, what more appealing ideal can one 
conjure up? Nor is it an utterly unrealizable 
ideal, for in spite of the sneers of the cynics, 
there are such couples, even at the present time 
and even in our largest Babylons. . . . 
We cannot prevent the cynics from sneering, 
but even they must admit that monogamy is 
here, is the dominant system, is the only socially 
approved and legally permitted system, and we 
have to deal with it. And those radical sexolo- 
gists who do not believe that monogamy is the 
best system of sexual relationship, who are sure 
that it will not survive for all eternity, that it 
will be replaced in the future by a higher ad- 
justment, will agree, even if they do so reluc- 
7 8 
INTRODUCTION 
tantly, that for a few years to come—say five 
hundred to a thousand—it will be the only feasi- 
ble, the only socially admissible and legally 
sanctioned system. 
This being the case, it becomes the sexolo- 
gist’s most sacred duty to do everything in his 
power to make the monogamic relationship as 
pleasant as possible, to remove as far as possi- 
ble all removable causes of friction, to steer 
the frail matrimonial bark in safe channels, to 
guard it from being wrecked on the Scylla of 
asceticism or the Charybdis of excess; in short 
to help the Man and the Woman to go through 
life in mutual love and respect, finding full satis- 
faction in each other, without any desire for any 
other man or woman. 
This is the object of Dr. Stopes’ fine book. 
It would be too much to expect any one work to 
succeed in converting every home from the hell 
that it often is into the paradise that it should 
be; but if a careful reading of it preserves the 
temper of some men, improves the health and 
cures the insomnia of some women, if it saves a 
few homes from disruption, it will be decidedly 
worth while, and its author will be called blessed 
—and will deserve to be. INTRODUCTION 
9 
There is plenty of love outside of marriage; 
there is not enough in marriage; and they who 
labor to augment and intensify Love in Mar- 
riage are doing good pro-social work. 
Dr. William J. Robinson. 
April 8, 1918. AUTHOR’S PREFACE 
More than ever to-day are happy homes 
needed. It is my hope that this book may 
serve the State by adding to their number. Its 
object is to increase the joys of marriage, and 
to show how much sorrow may be avoided. 
The only secure basis for a present-day State 
is the welding of its units in marriage: but 
there is rottenness and danger at the founda- 
tions of the State if many of the marriages are 
unhappy. To-day, marriage is far less happy 
than appears on the surface. Too many who 
marry expecting joy are bitterly disappointed; 
and the demand for “freedom” grows: while 
those who cry aloud are generally unaware 
that it is more likely to have been their own 
ignorance than the “marriage-bond” which 
was the origin of their unhappiness. 
It is never easy to make marriage a lovely 
thing; and it is an achievement beyond the 
powers of the selfish, or the mentally cowardly. 
Knowledge is needed, and as things are at pres- 
11 12 
AUTHOR’S PREFACE 
ent knowledge is almost unobtainable by those 
who are most in want of it. 
The problems of the sex-life are infinitely 
complex, and for their solution urgently de- 
mand both sympathy and scientific research. 
I have some things to say about sex, which, so 
far as I am aware, have not yet been said, or 
if said will bear repeating and reemphasizing, 
things which seem to me to be of profound im- 
portance to men and women who hope to make 
their marriage beautifuL 
This little book is less a record of a research 
than an attempt to present in easily under- 
standable form the clarified and crystallized 
results of long and patient investigations. Its 
simple statements are based on a very large 
number of first hand observations, on con- 
fidences from men and women of all classes and 
types, and on facts gleaned from wide reading. 
My original contributions to the age-long 
problems of marriage will be found principally 
in Chapter IV; also in Chapters V and VIII. 
The other chapters fill in what I hope is an 
undistorted and unexaggerated picture of the 
potential beauties and realities of marriage. 
The whole is written simply, and for the or- AUTHOR’S PREFACE 
13 
dinary untrained reader, though it embodies 
some observations which will be new even to 
those who have made scientific researches on 
the subjects of sex and human physiology. 
I do not touch here upon the many human 
variations and abnormalities which bulk so 
largely in most books on sex, nor do I deal with 
the many problems raised by incurably unhap- 
py marriages. 
In the following pages I speak to those—and 
in spite of all our neurotic literature and plays, 
they are in the great majority—who are normal 
and who are married or about to be married, 
and hope, but do not know how, to make their 
marriages happy and successful. 
To the reticent, as to the conventional, it 
may seem a presumption or a superfluity to 
speak of the details of the most complex of all 
human functions. They ask: Is not instinct 
enough? The answer is: No, instinct is not 
enough. In every other human activity it has 
been realized that training is essential to crea- 
tures of intellectual capacity like ourselves. 
As Saleeby once wisely pointed out: A cat 
knows how to manage her new-born kittens, how 
to bring them up and teach them; a human 14 
AUTHOR’S PREFACE 
mother does not know how to manage her baby 
unless she is trained, either directly or by her 
own quick observation, A cat performs her 
simple duties by instinct; a human mother has 
to be trained to fulfill her very complex ones. 
And the same is true, and even to a greater 
extent, in the subtle complexities of sex. In 
civilized countries, in modern times, the old 
traditions, the profound primitive knowledge of 
the needs of both sexes have been lost—and 
nothing but a muffled confusion of individual 
gossip disturbs a silence, shame-faced or foul. 
Here and there, in a family of fine tradition, a 
youth or maiden may learn some of the mys- 
teries of marriage, but the great majority of 
people in the English speaking countries have 
no glimmering of knowledge of the supreme 
human art, the Art of Love. And even in books 
on advanced Physiology and Medicine the gaps, 
the omissions and even the misstatements, are 
amazing. 
In my own marriage I paid such a terrible 
price for sex-ignorance that I feel that knowl- 
edge gained at such a price should be placed at 
the service of humanity. 
In this book, average, healthy, mating crea- 
tures who come within the limits of what may AUTHOR’S PREFACE 
15 
be called “normal,” will find information which 
should be known to every one of our race—but 
is not—and which may save them years of 
heartache and blind groping in the dark. 
M. C. Stopes. LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
CHAPTER I 
THE HEART’S DESIRE 
“She gave him comprehension of the meaning of love: a 
word in many mouths, not often explained. With her, wound 
in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify a new start in 
our existence, a finer shoot of the tree stoutly planted in good 
gross earth; the senses running their live sap, and the minds 
companioned, and the spirits made one by the whole-natured 
conjunction. In sooth, a happy prospect for the sons and 
daughters of Earth, divinely indicating more than happiness: 
the speeding of us, compact of what we are, between the 
ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of 
certain nobler races, now very dimly imagined.”—George 
Meredith, Diana of the Crossways. 
Every heart desires a mate. For some rea- 
son beyond our comprehension, nature has so 
created us that we are incomplete in ourselves; 
neither man nor woman singly can know the 
joy in the performance of all the human func- 
tions ; neither man nor woman singly can create 
another human being. This fact, which is ex- 
17 18 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
pressed in onr outward divergencies of form, 
influences and colors the whole of our lives; and 
there is nothing for which the innermost spirit 
of one and all so yearns as for a sense of union 
with another soul, and the perfecting of one- 
self which such union brings. 
In all young people, unless they have in- 
herited depraved or diseased tendencies, the old 
desire of our race springs up afresh in its pris- 
tine beauty. 
With the dreams and bodily changes of 
adolescence, come to the youth and maiden the 
strange and powerful impulses of sex. The 
bodily differences of the two, now accentuated, 
become mystical, alluring, enchanting in their 
promise. Their differences unite and hold to- 
gether the man and the woman so that their 
bodily union is the solid nucleus of an immense 
fabric of interwoven strands reaching to the 
uttermost ends of the earth; some lighter than 
the filmiest cobweb, or than the softest wave 
of music, iridescent with the colors not only of 
the visible rainbow, but of all the invisible 
glories of the wave-lengths of the soul. 
However much he may conceal it under as- 
sumed cynicism, worldiness, or self-seeking, the 
heart of every young man yearns with a great THE HEART’S DESIRE 
19 
longing for the fulfilment of the beautiful dream 
of a life-long union with a mate. Each heart 
knows instinctively that it is only one’s mate 
who can give full comprehension of all the po- 
tential greatness in one’s soul, and have tender 
laughter for all the child-like wonder that 
lingers so enchantingly even in the white-haired. 
The search for a mate is a quest for an un- 
derstanding soul clothed in a body beautiful, 
but unlike our own. 
In the modern world, those who set off on 
high endeavors or who consciously separate 
themselves from the ordinary course of social 
life, are comparatively few, and it is not to 
them I am speaking. The great majority of 
our citizens—both men and women—after a 
time of waiting, or of exploring, or of oscillat- 
ing from one attraction to another, “settle 
down” and marry. 
Very few are actually so cynical as to marry 
without the hope of happiness; while most 
young people, however their words may deny 
it and however they may conceal their tender 
hopes by an assumption of cynicism, reveal 
that they are conscious of entering on a new 
and glorious state by their radiant looks and 
the joyous buoyancy of their actions. In the 20 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
kisses and the hand-touch of the betrothed are a 
zest and exhilaration which stir the blood like 
wine. The two read poetry, listen entranced 
to music which echoes the songs of their pulses, 
and see reflected in each other’s eyes the beauty 
of the world. In the midst of this celestial in- 
toxication they naturally assume that, as they 
are on the threshold of their lives, so too are 
they in but the antechamber of their experience 
of spiritual unity. 
The more sensitive, the more romantic, and 
the more idealistic is the young person of either 
sex, the more his or her soul craves for some 
kindred soul with whom the whole being can 
unite. But all have some measure of this de- 
sire, even the most prosaic, and we know from 
innumerable stories that the sternest man of 
affairs, he who may have worldly success of 
every sort, may yet, through the lack of a real 
mate, live with a sense almost as though the 
limbs of his soul had been amputated. Ed- 
ward Carpenter has beautifully voiced this 
longing: 
“That there should exist one other person in the 
world towards whom all openness of interchange 
should establish itself, from whom there should be no 
concealment; whose body should be as dear to one. THE HEART’S DESIRE 
21 
in every part, as one’s own; with whom there should 
be no sense of Mine or Thine, in property or posses- 
sion ; into whose mind one’s thoughts should naturally 
flow, as it were to know themselves and to receive a 
new illumination; and between whom and oneself 
there should be a spontaneous rebound of sympathy 
in all the joys and sorrows and experiences of life; 
such is perhaps one of the dearest wishes of the soul. ’ ’ 
—Love’s Coming of Age. 
It may chance that some one into whose hands 
this book falls may protest that he or she has 
never felt the fundamental yearning to form a 
part of that trinity which alone is the perfect 
expression of humanity. If that is the case, 
it is possible that all unconsciously he may be 
suffering from a real malady—sexual anes- 
thesia. This is the name given to an inherent 
coldness, which, while it lacks the usual human 
impulse of tenderness, is generally quite un- 
conscious of its lack. It may even be that the 
reader’s departure from the ordinary ranks of 
mankind is still more fundamental, in which 
case, instead of sitting in judgment on the ma- 
jority, he would do well to read some such books 
as those of Forel, Havelock Ellis, Bloch, or 
Krafft-Ebing, in order that his own nature may 
be made known to him. He may then discover 22 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
to which type of our widely various humanity 
he belongs. He need not read my book, for it 
is written about, and it is written for, ordinary 
men and women, who feeling themselves incom- 
plete, yearn for a union that will have power 
not only to make a fuller and richer thing of 
their own lives, but which will place them in a 
position to use their sacred trust as creators 
of lives to come. 
It has happened many times in human history 
that individuals have not only been able to 
conquer this natural craving for a mate, but 
have set up celibacy as a higher ideal. In its 
most beautiful expression and sublimest mani- 
festations, the celibate ideal has proclaimed a 
world-wide love, in place of the narrower human 
love of home and children. Many saints and 
sages, reformers, and dogmatists have modeled 
their lives on this ideal. But such individuals 
cannot be taken as the standard of the race, for 
they are out of its main current: they are 
branches which may flower, but never fruit in 
a bodily form. 
In this world our spirits not only permeate 
matter but find their only expression through 
its medium. So long as we are human we must THE HEART’S DESIRE 
23 
have bodies, and bodies obey chemical and 
physiological, as well as spiritual laws. 
If our race as a whole set out to pursue an 
ideal which must ultimately eliminate bodies 
together, it is clear that very soon we should 
find the conditions of our environment so 
altered that we could no longer speak of the 
human race. 
In the meantime we are human. We each and 
all live our lives according to laws, some of 
which we have begun to understand, many of 
which are completely hidden from us. The 
most complete human being is he or she who 
consciously or unconsciously obeys the pro- 
found physical laws of our being in such a way 
that the spirit receives much help and as little 
hindrance from the body as possible. A mind 
or spirit finds its fullest expression thwarted by 
the misuse or the gross abuse of the body in 
which it dwells. By the ignorant or self-in- 
dulgent breaking of fundamental laws, the deep- 
est harmonies are dislocated. The small- 
minded ascetic endeavors to grow spiritually 
by destroying his physical instincts instead of 
by using them. 
But I would proclaim that we are set in the 
world so to mold matter that it may express 24 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
our spirit; that it is presumption to profess 
to fight the immemorial laws of our physical 
being, and that he who does so loses uncon- 
sciously the finest flux in which wondrous new 
creations take their rise. 
To use a homely simile—one might compare 
two human beings to two wires through which 
pass electric currents. Isolated from each 
other the electric forces pass uninterrupted 
along their length, but if these wires come into 
the right juxtaposition, the force is transmuted, 
and a spark, a glow of burning light arises be 
tween them. Such is love. 
From the body of the loved one’s simple, 
sweetly colored flesh, which our animal instincts 
urge us to desire, there springs not only the 
wonder of a new bodily life, but also the en- 
largement of the horizon of human sympathy 
and the glow of spiritual understanding which 
one could never have attained alone. 
Many reading this may feel conscious that 
they have had physical union without such 
spiritual accompaniments, perhaps even with- 
out an accession of ordinary pleasure. If that 
is so, it can only be because, consciously or un- 
consciously, they have broken some of the pro- 
found laws which govern the love of man and THE HEART’S DESIRE 
25 
woman. Only by learning to bold a bow cor- 
rectly can one draw music from a violin. Only 
by obedience to the laws of the lower plane can 
one step up to the plane above. CHAPTER II 
THE BROKEN JOY 
“What shall be done to quiet the heart-cry of the world? 
How answer the dumb appeal for help we so often divine 
below eyes that laugh?”—A. E. in The Hero in Man. 
Dreaming of happiness, feeling that at last 
they have each found the one who will give 
eternal understanding and tenderness, the 
young man and maiden marry. 
At first, in the time generally called the 
honeymoon, the unaccustomed freedom and the 
sweetness of the relation often do bring real 
happiness. How long does it last? Generally, 
a far shorter time than is generally acknowl- 
edged. 
In the first joy of their union it is hidden 
from the two young people that they know lit- 
tle or nothing about the fundamental laws of 
each other’s being. Much of the sex-attraction 
(not only among human beings but throughout 
the whole of the animal world) depends upon 
the differences between the two that pair; and 
26 THE BROKEN JOY 
27 
probably taking them all unawares, those very 
differences which drew them together now be- 
gin to work their undoing. But so long as the 
first illusion that each understands the other 
is supported by the thrilling delight of ever- 
fresh discoveries, the sensations lived through 
are so rapid, and so joyous that the lovers do 
not realize that there is no firm foundation be- 
neath their feet. While even in the happiest 
cases there may be divergences about religion, 
politics, social customs and opinions on things 
in general, these, with good will, patience, and 
intelligence on either side, can be ultimately 
adjusted, because in all such things there is a 
common meeting ground for the two. Human 
beings, while differing widely about every con- 
ceivable subject in these human relations, have 
at least thought about them, threshed them out, 
and discussed them openly for generations. 
But about the much more fundamental and 
vital problems of sex, there is a lack of knowl- 
edge so abysmal and so universal that its mists 
and shadowy darkness have affected even the 
few who lead us, and who are prosecuting re- 
search in these subjects. And the two young 
people begin to suffer from fundamental diver- 
gences, before perhaps they realize that such 28 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
exist, and with little prospect of ever gaining 
a rational explanation of them. 
Nearly all those, whose own happiness seems 
to be dimmed or broken, count themselves ex- 
ceptions, and comfort themselves with the 
thought of some of their friends, who they feel 
sure have attained the happiness which they 
themselves have missed. 
It is generally supposed that happy people, 
like happy nations, have no history—they are 
silent about their own affairs. Those who talk 
about their marriage are generally those who 
have missed the happiness they expected. True 
as this may be in general, it is not permanently 
and profoundly true. There are people who 
are reckoned, and still reckon themselves, hap- 
py, but who yet, unawares, reveal the secret 
disappointment which clouds their inward 
peace. 
Leaving out of account “femmes incom- 
prises” and all the innumerable cases of neu- 
rotic, supersensitive, and slightly abnormal 
people, it still remains an astonishing and 
tragic fact that so large a proportion of normal 
marriages lose their early bloom and are to 
some extent unhappy. 
For years many men and women have con- THE BROKEN JOY 
29 
fided to me the secrets of their lives; and of 
all the innumerable cases in which the circum- 
stances are known to me, there are tragically 
few marriages which approach even humanly 
attainable joy. 
Many of those considered by the world, by 
the relatives, even by the loved and loving part- 
ner, to be perfectly happy marriages, are se- 
cret tragedies to the more sensitive of the pair. 
Where the bride is, as are most of our edu- 
cated girls, composed of virgin sweetness shut 
in ignorance, the man is often the first to create 
“the rift within the lute”: but his suffering 
begins almost simultaneously with hers. Un- 
conscious of the nature, and even perhaps of 
the existence of his fault, he is bewildered and 
pained by her inarticulate pain. It is my ex- 
perience, that in the early days of marriage, 
the young man is even more sensitive, more 
romantic, more easily pained about all ordinary 
things than the woman, that he enters marriage 
hoping for an even higher degree of spiritual 
and bodily unit than does the girl or the woman. 
But the man is more quickly blunted, more 
swiftly rendered cynical, and is readier to look 
upon happiness as a utopian dream than is his 
mate. 30 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
On the other hand, the woman is slower to 
realize disappointment, and more often is the 
more profoundly wounded by the sex-life of 
marriage, with a slow corrosive wound that eats 
into her very being. 
Perfect happiness is a unity composed of a 
myriad essences: and this one supreme thing is 
exposed to the attacks of countless destructive 
factors. 
Were I to touch upon all the possible sources 
of marital disappointment and unhappiness, 
this book would expand into a dozen bulky 
volumes. As I am addressing those who I as- 
sume have read, or can read, other books writ- 
ten upon various ramifications of the subject, I 
will not discuss the themes which have been 
handled by many writers. 
In the last few years there has been such an 
awakening to the realization of the corrosive 
horror of all aspects of prostitution, that there 
is no need to elaborate the point that no mar- 
riage can be happy where the husband has, in 
buying another body, sold his own health, and 
is tainted with disease. 
Nor is it necessary, in speaking to well-mean- 
ing optimistic young couples, to enlarge upon THE BROKEN JOY 
31 
the obvious dangers of drunkenness, self-in- 
dulgence, and the cruder forms of selfishness. 
It is with the subtler infringements of the 
fundamental laws we have to deal. And the 
prime tragedy is that, as a rule, the two young 
people are both unaware of the existence of 
such decrees. Yet here, as elsewhere in na- 
ture, the law-breaker is punished whether he 
is aware of the existence of the law he breaks or 
not. 
In the state of ignorance which so largely 
predominates to-day, the first sign that things 
are amiss between the two who thought they 
were entering paradise together, is generally 
a sense of loneliness, a feeling that the one who 
was expected to have all in common, is outside 
some experience, some subtle delight, and fails 
to understand the needs of the loved one. Triv- 
ialities are often the first indicators of some- 
thing which takes its roots unseen in the pro- 
foundest depths of our natures. The girl may 
sob for hours over something that at first ap- 
pears so trifling that she cannot even tell a 
friend about it, while the young man, who 
thought that he had set out with his soul’s 
beloved upon an adventure into celestial dis- 
tances, may find himself apparently up against 32 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
some barrier in her which appears incompre- 
hensible or frivolous. 
Then, so strange is the mystical inter-relation 
between our bodies, our minds, and our souls, 
that for crimes committed in ignorance of the 
dual functions of the married pair, and the laws 
which harmonize them, the punishments are 
reaped on plains quite diverse, till new and 
ever new misunderstandings appear to spring 
spontaneously from the soil of their mutual con- 
tact. Gradually or swiftly each heart begins 
to hide a sense of boundless isolation. It may 
be urged that this statement is too sweeping. 
It is, however, based on innumerable actual 
cases. I have heard from women, whose mar- 
riages are looked upon by all as the happiest 
possible expressions of human felicity, the de- 
tails of secret pain of which they have allowed 
their husbands no inkling. Many men will 
know how they have hidden from their beloved 
wives a sense of dull disappointment, perhaps 
at her coldness in the marital embrace, or from 
the feeling that there is in her something elusive 
which always evades their grasp. 
Now that so many “movements” are abroad, 
folk on all sides are emboldened to express the 
opinion that it is marriage itself which is at THE BROKEN JOY 
33 
fault. Many think that merely by loosening 
the bonds, and making it possible to start afresh 
with some one else, their lives would be made 
harmonious and happy. By many such re- 
formers it is forgotten that he or she who knows 
nothing of the way to make marriage great 
and beautiful with one partner, is not likely to 
succeed with another. Only by a reverent 
study of the Art of Love can the beauty of its 
expression be realized in linked lives. 
And even when once learnt, the Art of Love 
takes time to practice. As Ellen Key says, 
“Love requires peace, love will dream; it can- 
not live upon the remnants of our time and our 
personality. ’ ’ 
There is no doubt that Love loses, in the haste 
and bustle of our modern turmoil, not only 
much of its charm and grace, but some of its 
vital essence. The result of the haste which so 
infests and poisons us, is often felt much more 
by the woman than by the man. The over- 
stimulation of city life tends to “speed up” 
the man’s reactions, but to retard hers. To 
make matters worse, even for those who have 
leisure to spend on love-making, the opportuni- 
ties for peaceful, romantic dalliance are less 
to-day in a city with its tubes and cinema shows 34 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
than in woods and gardens where the pulling 
of rosemary or lavender may be the sweet ex- 
cuse for the slow and profound mutual rousing 
of passion. Now, physical passion, so swiftly 
stimulated in man, tends to override all else, 
and the untutored male sees but one thing— 
the accomplishment of desire. The woman, for 
it is in her nature so to do, forgives the crude- 
ness, but sooner or later her love revolts, prob- 
ably in secret, and then forever after, though 
she may command an outward tenderness, she 
has nothing within but scorn and loathing for 
the act which should have been a perpetually 
recurring entrancement. 
So many people are now born and bred in 
artificial and false surroundings, that even the 
elementary fact that the acts of love should be 
joyous is unknown to them. Havelock Ellis 
(“Psychology of Sex,” vol. 6, 1913, p. 512) 
quotes the amazing statement of a distinguished 
American gynecologist, who said, “I do not be- 
lieve mutual pleasure in the sexual act has any 
particular bearing on the happiness of life.” 
This is, perhaps, an extreme case, yet so many 
distinguished medical men, gynecologists and 
physiologists, are either in ignorance or error 
regarding some of the profoundest facts of hu- THE BROKEN JOY 
35 
man sex-life, that it is not surprising that ordi- 
nary young couples, however hopeful, should 
break and destroy the joy that might have been 
their lifelong companion. CHAPTER HI 
woman’s “contrariness” 
“Oh! for that Being whom I can conceive to be in the 
world, though I shall not live to prove it. One to whom 
I might have recourse in all my Humours and Dispositions: in 
all my Distempers of Mind, visionary Causes of Mortifica- 
tion, and Fairy Dreams of Pleasure. I have been trying to 
train up a Lady or two for these good offices of Friendship, 
but hitherto I must not boast of my success.”—Herrick. 
What is the fate of the average man who 
marries, happily and hopefully, a girl well 
suited to him? He desires with his whole heart 
a mutual, lifelong happiness. He marries 
with the intention of fulfilling every injunction 
given him by father, doctor and friend. He 
is considerate in trifles, he speaks no harsh 
words, he and his bride go about together, walk 
together, read together, and perhaps, if they 
are very advanced, even work together. But 
after a few months, or maybe a few years, of 
marriage they seem to have drifted apart, and 
he finds her often cold and incomprehensible. 
If he is a nice man, he will not acknowledge 
36 WOMAN’S “CONTRARINESS” 
37 
this even to his best friend. But his heart 
knows its own pain. 
He may at times laugh, and in the friendliest 
spirit tease her about her contrariness. That 
is taken by every one to mean nothing but a 
playful concealment of his profound love. 
Probably it is. But gnawing at the very roots 
of his love is a hateful little worm—the sense 
that she is contrary. He feels that she is at 
times inexplicably cold: that, sometimes, when 
he has “done nothing” she will have tears in 
her eyes, irrational tears which she cannot ex- 
plain. 
He observes that one week his tender love* 
making and romantic advances win her to smiles 
and joyous yielding, and then perhaps a few 
days later the same, or more impassioned, ten- 
derness on his part is met by coldness or a 
forced appearance of warmth, which, while he 
may make no comment upon it, hurts him 
acutely. And this deep, inexplicable hurt is 
often the beginning of the end of love. Men 
like to feel that they understand their beloved, 
and that she is a rational being. 
After this has continued for some time, if 
the man is of at all a jealous nature, he will 
search among his wife’s acquaintances for 38 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
some one whom she may have met, for some 
one who may momentarily have diverted her 
attention- For the natural man at once seeks 
the explanation of his own ill-success in a rival. 
On some occasion when her coldness puzzles 
him he is conscious that his love, his own de- 
sires, are as ardent as they were a few days 
before. Knowing so intimately his own heart, 
he is sure of the steadiness of its love, and he 
feels acutely the romantic passion to which her 
beauty stirs him. He remembers perhaps that 
a few days earlier his ardor had awakened a 
response in her. Therefore he reaches what 
appears to him to be the infallible logical de- 
duction : that either there must be some rival— 
or his bride’s nature is incomprehensible, con- 
trary, capricious. Both—thoughts to madden. 
With capriciousness, man in general has lit- 
tle patience. Caprice renders his best efforts 
null and void. Woman’s caprice is, or appears 
to be, a negation of reason. And as reason is 
man’s most precious and hard-won faculty, the 
one which has raised mankind from the ranks 
of brute creation, he cannot bear to see it ap- 
parently flouted. 
That his bride should lack logic and sweet 
reasonableness—is a flaw it hurts him to recog- WOMAN’S “CONTRARINESS” 
39 
nize in her. He has to crush the thought down. 
It may then happen that the young man, him- 
self pained and bewildered at having pained 
his bride by the very ardor of his affection, 
may strive to please her by placing restraint 
upon himself. He may ask himself: Do not 
books on sex preach restraint to the man? He 
reads the books written for the guidance of 
youth, and finds ‘ ‘ restraint, ’’ “ self-control, ’ ’ 
generally, and often irrationally, urged in them 
all. His next step may then be to curtail the 
expression of his tender feelings, and to work 
hard and late in the evenings instead of kissing 
his bride’s fingers and playing with the lace of 
her dress. 
And then, if he is at all observant, he may be 
aggrieved and astonished to find her again 
wistful or hurt. With the tender longing to 
understand, which is so profound a characteris- 
tic in all the best of our young men, he begs, 
implores, or pets her into telling him some part 
of the reason for her fresh grievance. He dis- 
covers to his amazement that this time she is 
hurt because he had not made those very ad- 
vances which so recently had repelled her, and 
had been with such difficulty repressed by his 
intellectual efforts. 40 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
He asks himself in despair: What is a man 
to do ? If he is intelligent, he probably devours 
all the books on sex he can obtain. But in 
them he is not likely to find much real guidance. 
He learns from them that “restraint’’ is ad- 
vised by practically every author, but accord- 
ing to the character of the author he will find 
that “restraint” means having the marriage 
relation with his wife not more than three 
times a week, or once a month—or never at all 
except for the protection of children. He finds 
no rational guidance based on natural law. 
According to his temperament then, he may 
begin to practice “restraint.” 
But it may happen, and indeed it has prob- 
ably happened in every marriage once or many 
times, that the night comes when the man who 
has heroically practiced restraint, accidentally 
discovers his wife’s tears on her solitary pil- 
low. 
He seeks for advice indirectly from his 
friends, perhaps from his doctor. But can his 
local doctor or his friends tell him more than 
the chief European authorities on this subject? 
In Forel’s “The Sexual Question,” he reads 
the following advice: “The reformer, Luther, 
who was a practical man, laid down the average WOMAN’S “CONTRARINESS” 
41 
rule of two or three connections a week in mar- 
riage, at the time of highest sexual power. I 
may say that my numerous observations as a 
physician have generally confirmed this rule, 
which seems to me to conform very well to the 
normal state to which man 1 has become grad- 
ually adapted during thousands of years. Hus- 
bands who would consider this average as an 
imprescriptible right would, however, make 
wrong pretensions, for it is quite possible for a 
normal man to contain himself much longer, 
and it is his duty to do so, not only when his 
wife is ill, but also during menstruation and 
pregnancy.” 
Many men will not be so considerate as to fol- 
low this advice, which represents a high stand- 
ard of living; but on the other hand there are 
many who are willing to go not only so far, but 
further than this in their self-suppression in 
order to attain their heart’s desire, the happi- 
ness of their mate, and consequently their own 
life’s joy. 
However willing they may be to go further, 
the great question for the man is: How far! 
1 The italics are mine.—M. C. S. This pronouncement of an 
exceptionally advanced and broad-minded thinker serves to show 
how little attention has hitherto been paid to the woman’s side 
of this question, or to ascertaining her natural requirements. 42 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
There are innumerable leaders anxious to 
lead in many different directions. The young 
husband may try first one and then the other, 
and still find his wife unsatisfied, incomprehen- 
sible—capricious. Then it may be that, dis- 
heartened, he gets tired and she sinks into the 
dull apathy of acquiescence in her “wifely 
duty.” He is left with an echo of resentment 
in his heart: if only she had not been so capri- 
cious, they would still have been happy, he 
fancies. 
Many writers, novelists, poets, and drama- 
tists, have represented the uttermost tragedy 
of human life as due to the incomprehensible 
contrariness of the feminine nature. The kind- 
ly ones smile, perhaps a little patronizingly, 
and tell us that women are more instinctive, 
more child-like, less reasonable than men. The 
bitter ones sneer or reproach or laugh at this 
“contrariness” in woman that they do not un- 
derstand, and which, baffling their intellect, ap- 
pears to them to be irrational folly. 
It seems strange that those who search for 
natural law in every domain of the universe, 
should have so neglected the most vital subject, 
the one which concerns us all infinitely more 
than the naming of planets or the collecting of WOMAN’S “CONTRARINESS” 
43 
insects. Woman is not essentially capricious. 
Some of the laws of her being might have been 
discovered long ago had the existence of law 
been suspected. But it has been easier, has 
suited the general structure of society much 
better, for men to shrug their shoulders and 
smile at women as irrational and capricious 
creatures. 
Vaguely, perhaps, men have realized that 
much of the charm of life lies in the sex-dif- 
ferences between men and women; so they have 
snatched at the easy theory that women differ 
from themselves by being capricious. More- 
over, by attributing to mere caprice the cold- 
ness which at times comes over the most ardent 
woman, man was unconsciously justifying him- 
self by coercing her to suit himself. 
Conditions have been such that hitherto the 
explorers and scientific investigators, the his- 
torians and statisticians, the poets and artists 
have been mainly men. Consequently woman’s 
side of the sexual life has found little or no 
expression. Woman has been content to mold 
herself to the shape desired by man wherever 
possible, and she has stifled her natural feel- 
ings and her own deep thoughts as they welled 
up. 44 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
Most women have never realized intellect- 
ually, but many have been dimly half-conscious, 
that woman’s nature is set to rhythms over 
which man has almost no more control than he 
has over the tides of the sea. While the ocean 
can subdue and dominate man and laugh at his 
attempted restrictions, woman has bowed to 
man’s desire over her body, and, regardless of 
its pulses, he approaches her or not as is his 
will. Some of her rhythms defy him—the moon- 
month tide of menstruation, the cycle of ten 
moon-months of bearing the growing child and 
its birth at the end of the tenth wave—these 
are essentials too strong to be mastered by 
man. But the subtler ebb and flow of woman’s 
sex has escaped man’s observation or his care. 
If a swimmer comes to a sandy beach when 
the tide is out, and the waves have receded, 
leaving sand where he had expected deep blue 
water—does he, balked of his bath, angrily call 
the sea “capricious”? 
But the tenderest bridegroom finds only 
caprice in his bride’s coldness when she yields 
her sacrificial body while her sex-tide is at the 
ebb. 
There is another side to this problem, one WOMAN’S ‘‘CONTRARINESS’’ 
45 
perhaps even less considered by society. There 
is the case of the loving woman whose love-tide 
is at the highest and whose husband does not 
recognize the signs of her ardor. In our anae- 
mic artificial days it often happens that the 
man’s desire is a surface need, quickly satis- 
fied, colorless and lacking beauty, and that he 
has no knowledge of the rich complexities of 
love-making which an initiate of love’s mys- 
teries enjoys. To such a man his wife may in- 
deed seem petulant, capricious, or resentful 
without reason. 
Welling up in her are the wonderful tides, 
scented and enriched by the myriad experiences 
of the human race from its ancient days of 
leisure and flower-wreathed love-making, urg- 
ing her to transports and to self-expressions, 
were the man but ready to take the first step 
in the initiative, or to recognize and welcome it 
in her. Seldom dare any woman, still more 
seldom dare a wife, risk the blow at her heart 
which would be given were she to offer charm- 
ing love-play to which the man did not respond. 
To the initiate she will be able to reveal that 
the tide is up by a hundred subtle signs, upon 
which he will seize with delight. But if her 
husband is blind to them, there is for her noth- 46 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
ing but silence, self-suppression, and their in- 
evitable sequence of self-scorn followed by re- 
sentment towards the man who places her in 
such a position while talking of his ‘ 1 love. ’ ’ 
So little of the elements of the Art of Love 
do many men know that the case of Mrs. G. is 
certainly not exceptional. Her husband was 
accustomed to pet her and to have relations 
with her frequently, but yet he never took any 
trouble to rouse her sex-feelings. She had mar- 
ried as a very innocent girl, but often vaguely 
felt a sense of something lacking in her hus- 
band’s love. Her husband had never kissed 
her except on the lips or cheeks, but once at 
the crest of the wave of her sex-tide (all un- 
conscious that it was so) she felt a yearning to 
feel his head, his lips, pressed against her 
bosom. The sensitive interrelation between a 
woman’s breasts and the rest of her sex-life 
is a well-established fact, and there is a world 
of poetic beauty in the longing of a loving 
woman for the unconceived child, which melts 
in mists of tenderness toward her lover, the 
soft touch of whose lips can thus rouse her 
mingled joy. Because she shyly asked him, 
Mrs. G.’s husband impressed one short kiss on 
her bosom, and never repeated it. He was so WOMAN’S “CONTRARINESS” 
47 
ignorant that he did not know that the kissing 
and the tender fondling with his lips of a 
woman’s breasts is one of the first and surest 
ways to make her ready for complete and satis- 
factory union. In this way he inhibited her nat- 
ural desire, and as he never did anything to 
stir it, she never had any physical pleasure in 
their relation. Such prudish or careless hus- 
bands, content with their own satisfaction, lit- 
tle know the pent-up aching, or even resent- 
ment, which may eat into their wife’s joy. 
In many cases, however, the man is also the 
victim of the social customs which make sex- 
knowledge for women taboo. 
It has become a tradition of our social life 
that the ignorance of woman about her own 
body and that of her future husband is a flower- 
like innocence. And to such an extreme is this 
sometimes pushed, that not seldom is a girl 
married unaware that married life will bring 
her into physical relations with her husband, 
fundamentally different from those with her 
brother.2 When she discovers the true nature 
* To our blase men and women about town, this statement 
may appear ridiculous, fantastic or exaggerated. But it rep- 
resents a true state of affairs. Girls who get married in 
complete ignorance of what the marriage relation implies still 
exist to-day, in the year 1918 W. J. R. 48 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
of his body, and learns the part she has to play 
as a wife, she may refuse utterly to agree to 
her husband’s wishes. I know a case in which 
the husband, chivalrous and loving, had to wait 
years before his bride recovered from the shock 
of the discovery of the meaning of marriage, 
and was able to allow him a natural relation. 
There are known not a few cases in which the 
horror of the first night of marriage with a 
man less considerate, has driven the bride to 
suicide or insanity. 
That girls can reach a marriageable age with- 
out some knowledge of the realities of sex would 
seem incredible; but it is a fact. One highly 
educated lady whom I know intimately told 
me that when she was about eighteen she suf- 
fered many months of agonizing apprehension 
that she was about to have a baby, because a 
man had snatched a kiss from her lips at a 
dance. 
When girls so brought up are married, it is 
rape for the husband to insist on his “marital 
rights” at once. It will be difficult or impos- 
sible for such a bride ever after to experience 
the joys of sex-union, for such a beginning 
must imprint upon her consciousness the view 
that the man’s animal nature dominates him. WOMAN’S “CONTRARINESS” 
49 
In a magazine I came across a poem which 
vividly expresses this peculiarly feminine sor- 
row: 
“ ... To mate with men who have no soul about 
Earth grubbing; who, the bridal night, forsooth, 
Killed sparks that rise from instinct fires of life, 
And left us frozen things, alone to fashion 
Our souls to dust, masked with the name of wife— 
Long years of youth—love years—the years of pas- 
sion 
Yawning before us. So, shamming to the end, 
All shriveled by the side of him we wed, 
Hoping that peace may riper years attend, 
Mere odalisques are we—well housed, well fed.” 
Katherine Nelson. 
Many men who enter marriage sincerely and 
tenderly, may yet have some previous experi- 
ence of bought “love.” It is then not unlikely 
that they may fall into the error of explaining 
their wife’s experiences in terms of the reac- 
tions of the prostitute. They argue that, be- 
cause the prostitute showed physical excitement 
and pleasure in the sexual act, if the bride or 
wife does not do so, then she is “cold” or “un- 
dersexed.” They may not realize that often all 
the bodily movements of the prostitute are 
studied and simulated because her client enjoys 50 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
his orgasm best when he imagines that the 
woman in his arms has one simnltaneonsly. 
As Forel says: ‘ ‘ The company of prostitutes 
often renders men incapable of understanding 
feminine psychology, for prostitutes are hard- 
ly more than automata trained for the use of 
male sensuality. When men look among these 
for the sexual psychology of woman they find 
only their own mirror.” 
Fate is often cruel to men too. It may be 
that after years of fighting with his hot young 
blood a man has given up, and gone now and 
then for relief to prostitutes, and then later in 
life has met the woman who is his mate, and 
whom, after remorse for his soiled past, he 
marries. Then, unwittingly, he may make the 
wife suffer either by interpreting her in the 
light of the other women, or perhaps (though 
this happens less frequently) by setting her 
absolutely apart from them. I know of a man 
who, after a loose life, met a woman whom he 
reverenced and adored. He married her, but 
to preserve her “purity,” her difference from 
the others, he never had sexual relations with 
her.3 She was strangely unhappy, for she 
8 Such cases while rare are not altogether mythical, but 
the cause is generally to be found elsewhere. In some cases WOMAN’S “CONTRARINESS” 
51 
loved him passionately and longed for children. 
She appeared to him to be pining ‘ ‘ capricious- 
ly” when she became thin and neurotic. 
Perhaps if this man had known that some 
female animals suffer severely and may even 
die if denied sexual union,4 he might have seen 
his own behavior in a truer light. 
The idea that woman is lowered or “soiled” 
by sexual intercourse is still deeply rooted in 
some strata of our society. Many sources have 
contributed to this mistaken idea, not the least 
powerful being the ascetic ideal of the early 
church, and the fact that man has used woman 
as his instrument so often regardless of her 
wishes. Woman’s education and the trend of 
social feeling have largely been in the direc- 
tion of encouraging the idea that sex-life is a 
low, physical and degrading necessity which a 
pure woman should be above enjoying. 
In marriage the husband has used his ‘ ‘ mari- 
tfao abstinence is due to nothing more nor less than acquired 
impotence, the man’s inability to perform the act. In other 
cases Use reason may be found in a previous venereal disease 
and the man’s consequent fear to infect his wife. Consciously 
or unconsciously the man makes a virtue out of necessity. 
—W. J. B. 
* See Marshall, Quarterly Journal Microscopic Science, Yol. 
48, 1904, p. 323. 52 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
tal right”5 of intercourse when he wished it. 
Both law and custom have strengthened the 
view that he has the right to approach his wife 
whenever he wishes, and that she has no wishes 
and no fundamental needs in the matter at all. 
That woman has a rhythmic sex-tide which 
if its seasons were obeyed would ensure not 
only her enjoyment, hut would explode the myth 
of her capriciousness, seems not to be sus- 
pected. We have studied the wave-lengths of 
water, of sound, of light: but when will the 
sons and daughters of men study the sex-tide 
in woman and learn the laws of her Periodicity 
of Kecurrence of Desire? 
‘“Conjugal Rights.” Notes and Queries. May 16th 1891, 
p. 383. ‘ ‘ S. writes from the Probate Registry, Somerset 
House: ‘Previous to 1733 legal proceedings were recorded 
in Latin and the word then used where we now speak of 
rights was obsequies. For some time after the substitution of 
English for Latin, the term rites was usually, if not invariably, 
adopted; rights would appear to be a comparatively modern 
error.' ” 
“Mr. T. E. Paget writes . . . ‘Borneo and Juliet,* Act V. 
Scene III: 
What cursed foot wanders this way to-night 
To cross my obsequies, and true lovers’ rite! 
Well may Lord Esher say he has never been able to make out 
what the phrase ‘conjugal rights’ means. The origin of the 
term is now clear, and a blunder which was first made perhaps 
by a type-setter in the early part of the last century, and 
never exposed until now, has led to a vast amount of misap- 
prehension. Here, too, is another proof that Shakespeare was 
exceedingly familiar with ‘legal language.’ ” CHAPTER IV 
THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 
“The judgments of men concerning women are very rarely 
matters of cold scientific observation, but are coloured both 
by their own sexual emotions and by their own moral attitude 
toward the sexual impulse . . . [Men’s]. Statements about 
the sexual impulses of women often tell us less about women 
than about the persons who make them. “—H. Ellis. 
By the majority of “nice” people woman is 
supposed to have no spontaneous sex impulses. 
By this I do not mean a sentimental ‘1 falling in 
love,” but a physical, a physiological state of 
stimulation which arises spontaneously and 
quite apart from any particular man. It is in 
truth the creative impulse, and is an expression 
of a high power of vitality. So widespread in 
Anglo-Saxon countries is the view that it is only 
depraved women who have such feelings (es- 
pecially before marriage) that most women 
would rather die than acknowledge that they 
do at times feel a physical yearning indescrib- 
able, but as profound as hunger for food. Yet 
many, many women have shown me the truth of 
53 54 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
their natures when I have simply and naturally 
assumed that of course they felt it—being nor- 
mal women—and have asked them only: When? 
From their replies I have collected facts which 
are sufficient to overturn many ready-made 
theories about women. 
Some of the ridiculous absurdities which go 
by the name of science may be illustrated by 
the statement made by Windscheid in the Cen- 
trcdblatt fur Gynakologie: “In the normal 
woman, especially of the higher social classes, 
the sexual instinct is acquired, not inborn; when 
it is inborn, or awakens by itself, there is ab- 
normality. Since women do not know this in- 
stinct before marriage, they do not miss it when 
they have no occasion in life to learn it.” (El- 
lis’ translation.) 
The negation of this view is expressed in the 
fable of Hera quoted by Ellen Key. Hera sent 
Iris to earth to seek out three virtuous and 
perfectly chaste maidens who were unsoiled by 
any dreams of love. Iris found them, but could 
not take them back to Olympus for they had 
already been sent for to replace the superan- 
nuated Furies in the infernal regions. 
Nevertheless it is true that the whole educa- 
tion of girls, which so largely consists in the THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 
55 
concealment of the essential facts of life from 
them; and the positive teaching so prevalent 
that the racial instincts are low and shameful; 
and also the social condition which places so 
many women in the position of depending on 
their husband’s will not only for the luxuries 
but for the necessities of life, have all tended 
to inhibit natural sex-impulses in women, and 
to conceal and distort what remains. 
It is also true that in our northern climate 
women are on the whole naturally less persist- 
ently stirred than southerners; and it is further 
true that with the delaying of maturity, due to 
our ever-lengthening youth, it often happens 
that a woman is approaching or even past thirty 
before she is awake to the existence in her of 
the sex-urge. For many years before that, how- 
ever, the unrealized influence, diffused through- 
out her very system, has profoundly affected 
her. It is also true that (partly due to the inhibit- 
ing influences of our customs, traditions and so- 
cial code) women may marry before it wakes, 
and may remain long after marriage entirely 
unconscious that it exists subdued within them. 
For innumerable women too, the husband’s reg- 
ular habits of intercourse, claiming her both 
when she would naturally enjoy union and when 56 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
it is to some degree repugnant to her, have 
tended to flatten out the billowing curves of the 
line of her natural desire. One result, appar- 
ently little suspected, of using the woman as a 
passive instrument for man’s need has been, in 
effect, to make her that and nothing more. 
Those men—and there are many—who complain 
of the lack of ardor in good wives, are often 
themselves entirely to blame for it. When a 
woman is claimed at times when she takes no 
natural pleasure in union, it reduces her vital- 
ity, and tends to kill her power of enjoying it 
when the love season returns. 
It is certainly true of women as they have 
been made by the inhibitions of modem civili- 
zation, that most of them are only fully awake 
to the existence of sex after marriage. As 
we are civilized human beings, the social, in- 
tellectual, spiritual side of the love-choice have 
tended to mask the basic physiological aspect 
of women’s sex-life. To find a woman in whom 
the currents are not all so entangled that the 
whole is inseparable into factors, is not easy, 
but I have found that wives (particularly happy 
wives whose feelings are not complicated by the 
stimulus of another love) who have been sepa- 
rated from their husbands for some months through professional or business duties—whose 
husbands, for instance, are abroad—are the 
women from whom the best and most definite 
evidence of a fundamental rhythm of feeling 
can be obtained. Such women, yearning daily 
for the tender comradeship and nearness of 
their husbands, find in addition, at particular 
times, an accession of longing for the close 
physical union of the final sex-act. Many such 
separated wives feel this, and those I have 
asked to keep notes of the dates, have, with re- 
markable unanimity, told me that these times 
came specially just before and a week or so 
after the close of menstruation, coming, that 
is, about every fortnight. It is from such women 
that I got the first clew to the knowledge of 
what I call the Law of Periodicity of Recur- 
rence of desire in women. 
This law it is possible to represent graphi- 
cally as a curved line; a succession of crests and 
hollows as in all wave-lines. Its simplest and 
most fundamental expression, however, is gen- 
erally immensely complicated by other stimula- 
tions which may bring into it diverse series of 
waves, or irregular wave-crests. We have all, 
at some time, watched the regular ripples of the 
sea breaking against a sand-bank, and noticed 
THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 
57 58 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
that the influx of another current of water may 
send a second system of waves at right angles 
to the first, cutting athwart them, so that the 
two series of waves pass through each other. 
Woman is so sensitive and responsive an in- 
strument, and is so liable in our modern civil- 
ized world to be influenced by innumerable sets 
of stimuli, that it is perhaps scarcely surpris- 
ing that the deep, underlying waves of her prim- 
itive sex-tides have been obscured, and en- 
tangled so that their regular sequence has been 
masked in the choppy turmoil of her sea, and 
their existence has been largely unsuspected, 
and apparently quite unstudied. 
For some years I have been making as scien- 
tific and detailed a study as possible of this ex- 
tremely complex problem. Owing to the frank 
and scientific attitude of a number of women, 
and the ready and intimate confidence of many 
more, I have obtained a number of most inter- 
esting facts from which I think it is already pos- 
sible to deduce a generalization which is illu- 
minating, and may be of great medical and so- 
ciological value. 
It is first necessary to consider several other 
features of woman’s life, however. 
The obvious moon-month rhythm in woman, THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 
59 
so obvious that it cannot be overlooked, has 
been partially studied in its relation to some of 
the ordinary functions of her life. Experiments 
have been made to show its influence on the rate 
of breathing, the muscular strength, the tem- 
perature, the keenness of sight, etc., and these 
results have even been brought together and 
pictured in a single curved diagram supposed 
to show the variability in woman’s capacities 
at the different times in her twenty-eight-day 
cycle. 
But it brings home to one how little original 
work even in this field has yet been done, that 
the same identical diagram is repeated from 
book to book, and in Marshall’s “Physiology” it 
is “taken from Sellheim,” in Havelock Ellis 
‘ * from Van Ott, ’ ’ and in other books is re-copied 
and attributed to still other sources. 
This diagram appears to be the only one of 
its kind, and is reproduced by one learned au- 
thority after another, yet nearly every point on 
which this curve is based appears to have been 
disputed. 
According to this curve, woman’s vitality 
rises during the few days before menstruation, 
sinks to its lowest ebb during menstruation and 
rises shortly after, and then runs nearly level 60 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
till it begins to rise again before tbe next men- 
strual period. This simple curve may or may 
not be true for woman’s temperature, muscular 
strength, and the other relatively simple things 
which have been investigated. My work, and 
observations on a large number of women, all 
go to show that this curve does not represent 
the waves of woman’s sex-tides. 
The whole subject is so complex and so little 
studied that it is difficult to enter upon it at 
all without going into many details which may 
seem remote or dull to the general reader. 
Even a question which we must all have asked, 
and over which we have probably pondered in 
vain, namely: What is menstruation? cannot 
yet be answered. To the lay mind it would 
seem that this question should be answerable 
at once by any doctor; but many medical men 
are still far from being able to reply to it even 
approximately correctly. 
There are a good many slight variations 
among us, ranging from a three to a five week 
“month,” but the majority of the women of our 
race have a moon-month of twenty-eight days, 
once during which comes the flow of menstrua- 
tion. If we draw out a chart with succeeding 
periods of 28 days each, looking on each period THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 
61 
as a unit: When in this period is it that a 
normal healthy woman feels desire, or any up- 
welling of her sex-tides? 
The few statements which are made in gen- 
eral medical and physiological literature on the 
subject of sex feeling in women, are generally 
very guarded and vague. Marshall (“Physiol- 
ogy of Reproduction,” p. 138) for instance, 
says: * ‘ The period of most acute sexual feeling 
is generally just after the close of the menstrual 
period.” Ellis speaks of desire being stronger 
before and sometimes also after menstruation, 
and appears to lean to the view that it is natural 
for desire to coincide with the menstrual flow. 
After the most careful inquiries I have come 
to the conclusion that the general confusion re- 
garding this subject is due partly to the great 
amount of variation which exists between dif- 
ferent individuals, and partly to the fact that 
very few women have any idea of taking any 
scientific interest in life, and partly to the fact 
that the more profound, fundamental rhythm 
of sex desire which I have come to the conclu- 
sion exists or is potential in every normal 
woman, is covered over or masked by the more 
superficial and temporary influences due to a 
great variety of stimuli or inhibitions in mod- 62 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
ern life. For the present consideration I have 
tried to disentangle the profound and natural 
rhythm from the more irregular surface waves. 
Chart No. I may assist in making graphically 
clear what has been said in these last few pages. 
It is compounded from a number of individual 
records, and shows a fair average chart of the 
rhythmic sequence of superabundance and flag- 
ging in woman’s sex-vitality. The tops of the 
wave-crests come with remarkable regularity 
so that there are two wave-crests in each 
twenty-eight day month. The one comes on 
the two or three days just before menstruation: 
the other after; but after menstruation has 
ceased there is a nearly level interval, bringing 
the next wave-crest to the two or three days 
which come about eight or nine days after the 
close of menstruation, that is, just round the 
fourteen days, or half the moon month, since the 
last wave-crest. If this is put in its simplest 
way, one may say that there are fortnightly pe- 
riods of desire, arranged so that one period 
comes always just before each menstrual flow. 
Upon her vitality at the time, and the general 
health of the woman, the length of each desire- 
period, or, as we might say, the size and com- 
plexity ef each wave-crest, depends. Sometimes Curve showing the Periodicity of Recurrence of natural desire in healthy women. Various causes make slight irregu- 
larities in the position, size and duration of the “wave-crests," but the general rhythmic sequence is apparent. 
CHART I 
63 Curve showing the depressing effects on the “wave-crests” of fatigue and overwork. Crest a represented only 
by a feeble and transient up-welling. Shortly before and during the time of the crest a Alpine air restored the vitality 
of the subject. The increased vitality is shown by the height and number of the apices of this wave-crest. 
CHART II 
64 THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 
65 
for the whole of as many as, or even more than, 
three days she may be ardently and quite nat- 
urally stimulated, while at another time the 
same woman, if she is tired or overworked, may 
be conscious of desire for only a few hours, or 
even less. 
The effects of fatigue, city-life, bad feeding 
and indeed of most outward circumstances may 
be very marked, and may for years, or all her 
life, so reduce her vitality that a woman may 
never have experienced any spontaneous sex- 
impulse at all. 
The effects of fatigue, which reduces the vital 
energy, even in a normal, strongly sexed 
woman, can be seen on chart II, where at a 
the intermediate wave-crest is very much re- 
duced. This is not a generalized chart, but a 
detailed record of an actual individual case. 
Curves similar to those shown on charts I 
and II represent in general terms a simplified 
view of what my research leads me to believe 
to be the normal, spontaneous sex-tide in women 
of our race. As one young married woman 
confided to me, her longing for bodily union 
with her husband, as distinct from her longing 
for his daily companionship, seemed to well up 
naturally “like clock-work,” and this when he 66 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
had been long away from her. But human 
beings vary remarkably in every particular, and 
just as no two people have the same features, 
so no two people would have absolutely identi- 
cal curves were they recorded in sufficient de- 
tail. Many a woman is particularly conscious 
of only one period in each moon-month. Of such 
women, some feel the period which comes before 
menstruation, and some feel the one which fol- 
lows it. In those who generally feel only one, the 
second period is sometimes felt when they are 
particularly well, or only when they read excit- 
ing novels, or meet the man they love at a time 
coinciding with the natural but suppressed time 
of desire. There are a few women, who seem 
to be really a little abnormal, who feel the 
strongest desire actually during the menstrual 
flow. [There is no justification for applying 
the term abnormal to those women whose sex- 
urge is most intense during the menstrual 
period. The number of such women is larger 
than is generally assumed. W. J. R.] 
If any one who reads this thinks to test my 
view by questioning a number of women, the 
result will probably appear very conflicting, 
partly because it is not often that women will 
tell the truth about such a thing, and partly be- THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 
67 
cause in the larger number of women either one 
or the other period is the more acute and is the 
one they observe in themselves—if they have 
observed anything. But a delicate and more 
accurate investigation of such cases will often 
bring to light the existence of the second crest 
of sex desire. Once the fundamental idea is 
grasped, much that appeared obscure or of no 
significance becomes plain and full of meaning. 
One lady doctor with whom I discussed my view 
at once said that it illuminated many observa- 
tions she had made on her patients, but had 
not brought together or explained. 
There is but little evidence to be found in 
scientific works on sex, but an interesting in- 
stance is mentioned by Forel, “The Sexual 
Question,” in another connection. He says: “A 
married woman confessed to me, when I re- 
proached her for being unfaithful to her hus- 
band, that she desired coitus at least once a 
fortnight, and that when her husband was not 
there, she took the first comer.” We may per- 
haps all see in her want of self-control a 
grievous moral delinquency, but in her fort- 
nightly periods of desire she fits perfectly into 
the law which, it appears to me, governs the 
normal sex-tides of the female of our species. 68 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
In this connection it is of interest to note the 
decrees of the Mosaic Law regarding marital 
intercourse. Not only was all intercourse with 
a woman during her menstruation period very 
heavily punished (see Leviticus XX, 18: “If 
a man lie with a woman having her sickness 
. . . both of them shall be cut off from among 
their people”): but the Mosaic Law provided 
that women should be protected from inter- 
course for some days after each period. The 
results obtained by my independent investiga- 
tion thus find some support in this ancient wis- 
dom of the East. Modern writers are inclined 
to deride the Mosaic Law on the ground that it 
prohibits intercourse just at the time when 
they think sex-feeling should be strongest. But 
it does not appear on what grounds they make 
the latter statement, nor do they give any 
scientific data in support of it. Thus Galabin 
in his “Manual of Midwifery” says: “In the 
Jewish law women are directed to abstain1 from 
coitus during menstruation, and for seven days 
after its cessation. Strict observers of the law 
are said to go beyond what is commanded in 
(l In Leviticus XV, it is the man who is directed to abstain 
from touching the woman at this period, and who is rendered 
unclean if he does.) THE FUNDAMENTAL PULSE 
69 
Leviticus and even if the discharge lasts only 
for an hour or two, to observe five days during 
which the discharge might last, for the period 
itself, and add to these seven clear days, mak- 
ing twelve in all. ... It is much to be doubted 
whether ... a whole nation was ever induced 
to practice abstinence at the period of most 
acuce sexual feeling.” But as will readily be 
recognized, the old Jewish plan of having 
twelve clear days after the beginning of men- 
struation before the next union, is in almost 
exact harmony with the Law of Periodicity of 
Recurrence of desire in woman as shown in my 
charts. 
These comparatively simple curves represent 
what I would postulate as the normal spon- 
taneous up-welling of natural desire in woman. 
These are the foundations on which the edifice 
of the physical expression of love may be built. 
It must not be forgotten, however, that, partic- 
ularly in modern luxurious life, there are in- 
numerable excitements which may stimulate 
sexual feeling, just as there are many factors 
in our life which tend to inhibit or retard it. 
A woman may be, like a man, so swayed by a 
great love that there is not a day in the whole 
month when her lover’s touch, his voice, the 70 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
memory of his smile, does not stir her into the 
thrilling longing for the uttermost union. 
Hence it is often difficult, particularly for a 
woman dwelling with the man she loves, to rec- 
ognize this rhythm in herself, for she may be 
perpetually stimulated by her love and by his 
being. I am convinced, however, that ordinar- 
ily, whether she recognizes it by outward signs 
or not, it profoundly influences the woman and 
hence that it fundamentally affects the marriage 
relation in every way. The burning magnifi- 
cence of an overpowering lifelong love is not 
given to many, and a husband who desires last- 
ing and mutual happiness in his marriage, will 
carefully study his wife, observe how far she 
has a normal rhythm, and in what respects she 
possesses peculiar personal traits. He will 
then endeavor to adapt his demands on her so 
that they are in harmony with her nature. 
This mutual adaptation is not an entirely 
simple matter, and will be considered in the next 
chapter. CHAPTER V 
MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 
'“Leve worketh no ill to his neighbor. ’ ’ 
—St. Paxti* 
In the average man of our race desire knows 
no seasons beyond the slight slackening of the 
winter months and the heightening of spring 
and summer. Some men have observed in 
themselves a faintly-marked monthly rhythm, 
but in the majority of men desire, even if held 
in stern check, is merely slumbering. It is 
always present, ever ready to wake at the light- 
est call, and often so spontaneously insistent 
as to require perpetual conscious repression. 
It would go ill with the men of our race had 
women retained the wild animals’ infrequent 
seasonal rhythm and with it her inviolable 
rights in her own body. Woman, too, has ac- 
quired a much more frequent rhythm; but, as 
it does not equal man’s, he has tended to ignore 
and override it, coercing her at all times and 
71 72 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
seasons, either by force, or by the even more 
compelling power of “divine’’ authority and 
social tradition. 
If man’s desire is perpetual and woman’s 
intermittent, if man’s desire naturally wells up 
every day or every few days and woman’s only 
every fortnight or every month, it may appear 
at first sight impossible for the unwarped needs 
of both natures to be mutually satisfied. 
The sense that a satisfactory mutual adjust- 
ment is not within the realms of possibility 
has, indeed, obsessed our race for centuries. 
The result has been that the supposed need of 
one of the partners has tended to become para- 
mount, and we have established the social tradi- 
tions of a husband’s “rights” and wifely 
‘ ‘ duty. ’ ’ As one man quite frankly said to me: 
“As things are it is impossible for both sexes 
to get what they want. One must be sacrificed. 
And it is better for society that it should be 
the woman. ’ ’ 
Nevertheless, the men who consciously sacri- 
fice the women are in a minority. Most men 
act in ignorance. Our code, however, has blind- 
ly sacrificed not only the woman, but with her 
the happiness of the majority of men, who, in 
total ignorance of its meaning and results, have MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 
73 
grown up thinking that women should submit 
to regularly frequent, or even nightly, inter- 
course. For the sake of a few moments of phys- 
ical pleasure they lose realms of ever-expand- 
ing joy and tenderness; and while men and 
women may not realize the existence of an un- 
trodden paradise, they both suffer, if only half 
consciously, from being shut out from it. 
Before making some suggestions which may 
help married people to find not only a via media 
of mutual endurance, but a via perfecta of mu 
tual joy, it is necessary to consider a few points 
about the actual nature of man’s “desire.” In 
the innumerable books addressed to the young 
which I have read, I have not found one which 
gives certain points regarding the meaning of 
the male sex-phenomena which must be grasped 
before it is possible to give rational guidance 
to intelligent young men. 
The general physiology of our body is given 
to us in youth and in a clean scientific way. 
But the physiology of our most profoundly dis- 
turbing functions is ignored—in my opinion 
criminally ignored. 
Every mating man and woman should know 
at least the essential facts: 
The sex organs of a man consist not only of 74 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
the testicles which give rise to the living, mov- 
ing, ciliated cells, the spermatozoa, and of the 
channel or tnbe in the center of the penis 
through which they pass and by means of which 
they are directed into the proper place for their 
deposition, the woman’s vagina. Associated 
with these primary and essential structures 
there are other tissues and glands which play 
subsidiary but yet very important parts. Man’s 
penis, when quiet and unstimulated, is soft, 
small and drooping. But when stimulated, 
either by physical touch which acts through the 
nerves and muscles directly, or by the sight, 
or nearness, or thought of some one lovely and 
beloved, which acts indirectly through messages 
from the brain, it increases greatly in size, and 
becomes stiff, turgid and erect. Many men 
imagine that the turgid condition of an erection 
is due to the local accumulation of semen, and 
that these can only be naturally got rid of by 
an ejaculation. This is entirely wrong. The 
enlargement of the penis is not at all due to 
the presence of actual semen, but is due to the 
effects of the nervous reaction on the blood 
vessels, leading to the filling, principally, of the 
veins, and of the arteries. As the blood enters 
but does not leave the penis, the venous eavi- MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 
75 
ties in it fill up with venous blood until the 
whole is rigid. When rigid, this organ is able 
to penetrate the female entrance, and there the 
further stimulation calls out the semen from 
its storehouses, the seminal vesicles, the testes 
and the prostate, and they pass down the chan- 
nel within the penis (the urethra) and are ex- 
pelled. 
If this is clear, it will be realized that the 
stiffening and erection does not necessarily call 
for relief in the ejaculation of semen. If the 
veins can empty themselves, as they naturally 
do when the nervous excitement which con- 
stricted them locally passes, the erection will 
subside without any loss of semen, by the mere 
passing back of the locally excessive blood into 
the ordinary circulatory system. This can hap- 
pen quite naturally and healthily when the 
nerves are soothed, either physically or as a re- 
sult of a sense of mental peace and exaltation. 
When on the other hand the local excitement 
culminates in the calling up and expulsion of 
the semen, after it has once started the ejacula- 
tion becomes quite involuntary and the sper- 
matozoa and the secretions associated with them 
pass out of the system and are entirely lost. 
Of what does this loss consist? It is esti- 76 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
mated that there are about two hundred and 
fifty million spermatozoa in a single average 
ejaculation.2 Each single one of these (in 
healthy men) is capable of fertilizing a woman’s 
egg-cell and giving rise to a new human being. 
(Thus by a single ejaculation one man might 
fertilize nearly all the marriageable women in 
the world.) 3 Each single one of those minute 
spermatozoa carries countless hereditary traits, 
and each consists very largely of nuclear plasm 
—the most highly specialized and richest sub- 
stance in our bodies. 
It is therefore the greatest mistake to imagine 
that the semen is something to be got rid of 
frequently—all the vital energy and the 
precious chemical substances which go to its 
composition can be better utilized by being 
transformed into other creative work on most 
days of the month. And so mystic and won- 
derful are the chemical transformations going 
on in our bodies that the brain can often set 
this alchemy in motion, particularly if the brain 
is helped by knowledge. A strong will can of- 
ten calm the nerves which regulate the blood 
2 See Pfliiger’s Archiv. 1891. 
* This is less utterly fantastic than it may sound, now that 
science has taught us how to fertilize females by semen from 
males they may never have seen. MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 
77 
supply, and order the distended veins of the 
penis to retract and subside without wasting 
the semen in an ejaculation. 
But while it is good that a man should be 
able to do this often, it is not good to try to do 
it always. The very restraint which adds to a 
man’s strength up to a certain point, taxes his 
strength when carried beyond it. It is my be- 
lief that just sufficient restraint to carry him 
through the ebb-tides of his wife’s sex-rhythm 
is usually the right amount to give the best 
strength, vigor, and joy to a man, if both are 
normal people. If the wife has, as I think the 
majority of healthy well-fed young women will 
be found to have, a fortnightly consciousness 
or potentiality of desire, then the two should 
find a perfect mutual adjustment in having 
fortnightly unions; for this need not be confined 
to only a single union on each occasion. Many 
men who can well practice restraint for twelve 
or fourteen days, will find that one union only 
will not then thoroughly satisfy them; and if 
they have the good fortune to have healthy 
wives, they will find that the latter, too, have 
the desire for several unions in the course of a 
day or two. If the wave-crests on our charts 
are studied it will be seen that they spread 78 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
over two or three days and show several small 
minor crests. This is what happens when a 
woman is thoroughly well and vital; her desire 
bubbles up during a day or two, sometimes 
even every few hours if it does not, and some- 
times even if it does, receive satisfaction. 
Expressed in general terms (which, of course, 
will not fit everybody) my view may be formu- 
lated thus: The mutually best regulation of 
intercourse in marriage is to have three or 
four days of repeated unions, followed by about 
ten days without any unions at all, unless some 
strong external stimulus has stirred a mutual 
desire. 
I have been interested to discover that the 
people known to me who have accidentally fixed 
upon this arrangement of their lives are happy: 
and it should be noted that it fits in with the 
charts I give which represent the normal, spon- 
taneous feeling of so many women. 
There are many women, however, who do not 
feel, or who may not at first recognize, a second, 
but have only one time of natural pleasure in 
sex in each moon-month. Many men of strong 
will and temperate lives will be able so to con- 
trol themselves that they can adjust themselves 
to this more restrained sex-life, as do some with MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 
79 
whom I am acquainted. On the other hand, 
there will be many who find this period too long 
to live through without using a larger amount 
of energy in restraining their impulses than is 
justifiable. It seems to me never justifiable to 
spend so much energy and will power on re- 
straining natural impulses, that valuable work 
and intellectual power and poise are made to 
sutler. If, then, a strongly sexed husband, who 
finds it a real loss to his powers of work to 
endure through twenty-six days of abstinence, 
should find himself married to a wife whose 
vitality is so low that she can only take pleasure 
in physical union once in her moon-month (in 
some it will be before, in some a little time after, 
her menstrual flow) he should note carefully 
the time she is spontaneously happy in their 
union, and then at any cost restrain himself 
through the days immediately following, and 
about a fortnight after her time of desire he 
should set himself ardently to woo her. Un- 
less she is actually out of health he is more 
likely then than at any other time to succeed 
not only in winning her compliance, but also in 
giving her enjoyment and attaining mutual 
ecstasy. 
The husband who so restrains himself, even 80 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
if it is hard for him to do it, will generally 
find that he is a thousand fold repaid—not only 
by the increasing health and happiness of his 
wife, and the much intenser pleasure he gains 
from their mutual intercourse, but also by his 
own added vitality and sense of self-command. 
A fortnight is not too long for a healthy man to 
restrain himself with advantage. 
Sir Thomas Clouston says (“Before I Wed,” 
p. 84): “Nature has so arranged matters that 
the more constantly control is exercised the 
more easy and effective it becomes. It becomes 
a habit. The less control is exercised, the 
greater tendency there is for a desire to become 
a craving of an uncontrollable kind, which is 
itself of the nature of disease, and means death 
sooner or later.” This conclusion is not only 
the result of the intellectual and moral experi- 
ence of our race, but is supported by physio- 
logical experiments. 
While a knowledge of the fundamental laws of 
our being should in the main regulate our lives, 
so complex are we, so sensitive to a myriad 
impressions, that clock-work regularity can 
never rule us. 
Even where the woman is strongly sexed, 
with a well-marked recurrence of desire, which MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 
81 
is generally satisfied by fortnightly unions, it 
may not infrequently happen that, in between 
these periods, there may be additional special 
occasions when there springs up a mutual long- 
ing to unite. These will generally depend on 
some event in the lovers’ lives which stirs their 
emotions; some memory of past passion, such 
as an anniversary of their wedding, or perhaps 
will be due to a novel, poem, or picture which 
moves them deeply. If the man she loves plays 
the part of tender wooer, even at times when 
her passion would not spontaneously arise, a 
woman can generally be stirred so fundamental- 
ly as to give a passionate return. But at the 
times of her ebb-tides the stimulus will have 
to be stronger than at the high tides, and it will 
then generally be found that the appeal must 
be made even more through her emotional and 
spiritual nature and less through the physical 
than usual. 
The supreme law for husbands is: Remem- 
ber that each act of union must be tenderly 
wooed for and won, and that no union should 
ever take place unless the woman also desires 
it and is made physically ready for it. 
While in most marriages the husband has to 
restrain himself to meet the wife’s less fre- 82 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
quently recurrent rhythm, there are, on the 
other hand, marriages in which the husband is 
so under-sexed that he cannot have ordinary 
union save at very infrequent intervals with- 
out a serious effect on his health. If such a 
man is married to a woman who has inherited 
an unusually strong and over-frequent desire, 
he may suffer by union with her, or may cause 
her suffering by refusing to unite. In such 
cases we are helpless. We have to deal with 
one of the many marital tragedies. Unfor- 
tunately, the variations in the sex-need of dif- 
ferent healthy people is immense, far greater 
than can be suggested in this book.4 Indeed 
the ‘ ‘ normal ’ ’ is rarer than the variations upon 
it. 
Ellis states that the Queen of Aragon or- 
dained that six times a day was the proper 
rule in legitimate marriage. So abnormally 
sexed a woman would to-day probably succeed 
in killing by exhaustion a succession of hus- 
bands, for the man who could match such a de- 
sire is very rare nowadays. 
Though the timing and the frequency of union 
* On this point the reader may consult Dr. Robinson’s 
“Treatise on Sexual Impotence and Other Sexual Disorders 
in Men and Women.” MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 
83 
are the points about which questions are often- 
est asked by the ignorant and well-meaning, 
and are most misunderstood, yet there are other 
fundamental facts concerning coitus about 
which even medical men seem surprisingly 
ignorant. Regarding these, a simple statement 
of the physiological facts is essential. 
An impersonal and scientific knowledge of the 
structure of our bodies is the surest safeguard 
against prurient curiosity and lascivious gloat- 
ing. This knowledge at the back of the minds 
of the lovers, though not perhaps remembered 
as such, may also spare the unintentioned cruel- 
ty of handling which so readily injures one 
whose lover is ignorant. 
What actually happens in an act of union 
should be known. After the preliminaries of 
love-play the stimulated penis, erect, enlarged 
and stiffened, is pressed into the woman’s 
vagina. Ordinarily when a woman is not stimu- 
lated, the walls of this canal as well as the 
exterior lips of soft tissue surrounding its exit, 
are dry and rather crinkled, and the vaginal 
opening is smaller than the man’s extended 
organ. But when the woman is what is phys- 
iologically called tumescent (that is, when she 
is ready for union and has been profoundly 84 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
stirred), these parts are all flushed by the inter- 
nal blood supply and to some extent are turgid 
like those of the man, while there is a plenti- 
ful secretion of mucus, which lubricates the 
channel of the vagina. In a really ardent 
woman the vagina may even spontaneously 
open and close as though panting with longing. 
(So powerful is the influence of thought on our 
bodily structure, that in some people all these 
physical results may be brought about by the 
thought of the loved one, by the enjoyment of 
tender words and kisses, and the beautiful sub- 
tleties of wooing). It can therefore be readily 
imagined that when the man tries to enter a 
woman whom he has not wooed to the point of 
stimulating her natural physical reactions of 
preparation, he is endeavoring to force his 
entry through a dry-walled opening too small 
for it. He may thus cause the woman actual 
pain, apart from the mental revolt and loath- 
ing she is likely to feel for a man who so re- 
gardlessly uses her. On the other hand, in the 
tumescent woman the opening, already natural- 
ly expanded, is lubricated by a flow of mucus, 
and all the nerves and muscles are ready to 
react and easily draw in the man’s entering 
organ. MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 
85 
This account is of the meeting of two who 
have been already married. The first union 
of a virgin girl differs, of course, from all 
others, for on that occasion the hymen is 
broken. One would think that every girl who 
was about to be married would be told of this 
necessary rupturing of the membrane and the 
temporary pain it will cause her: but even still 
large numbers of girls are allowed to marry in 
complete and cruel ignorance. 
It should be realized that a man does not 
woo and win a woman once for all when he mar- 
ries her: he must woo her before every separate 
act of coitus; for each act corresponds to a 
marriage, as the beasts of the field and the fowls 
of the air know it. Wild animals are not so 
foolish as man; a wild animal does not unite 
with his female without the wooing character- 
istic of his race, whether by stirring her by a 
display of his strength in fighting another male, 
or by exhibiting his beautiful feathers or song. 
And we must not forget that the wild animals 
are assisted by nature; they generally only woo 
just at the season when the female is beginning 
to feel natural desire. But man, who wants his 
mate all out of season as well as in it, has a 
double duty to perform, and must himself rouse, 86 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
charm and stimulate her to the local readiness 
which would have been to some extent naturally 
prepared for him had he waited till her own 
desire welled up. 
To render a woman ready before uniting with 
her is not only the merest act of humanity to 
save her pain, but is of value from the man’s 
point of view, for (unless he is one of those 
relatively few abnormal and diseased variants 
who delight only in rape) the man gains an im- 
mense increase of sensation from the mutuality 
thus attained. [See note at end of book.] 
When the two have met and united, the usual 
result is that, after a longer or shorter interval, 
the man’s mental and physical stimulation 
reaches a climax in sensory intoxication and in 
the ejaculation of semen. Where the two are 
perfectly adjusted, the woman simultaneously 
reaches the crisis of nervous reactions and 
muscular convulsions similar to his. This 
mutual orgasm is extremely important, but in 
distressingly many cases the man’s climax 
comes so swiftly that the woman’s reactions are 
not nearly ready and she is left without it. 
Though in some instances the woman may 
have one or more crises before the man achieves 
his, it is perhaps hardly an exaggeration to MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 
87 
say that 70 or 80 per cent, of our married 
women (in the middle and intellectual classes) 
are deprived of the full orgasm through the 
excessive speed of the husband’s reactions, l e., 
through premature ejaculation (ejaculatio 
precox) or through some mal-adjustment of 
the relative shapes and positions of the organs. 
So complex, so profound, are woman’s sex-in- 
stincts that in rousing them the man is rousing 
her whole body and soul. And this takes time. 
More time indeed than the average husband 
dreams of spending upon it. Yet woman has 
at the surface a small vestigial organ called 
the clitoris, which corresponds morphologically 
to the man’s penis and which, like it, is extreme- 
ly sensitive to touch-sensations. This little 
crest, which lies anteriorly between the inner 
lips round the vagina, erects itself when the 
woman is really tumescent, and by the stimula- 
tion of movement it is intensely roused and 
transmits this stimulus to every nerve in her 
body. But even after a woman’s dormant sex- 
feeling is aroused and all the complex reactions 
of her being have been set in motion, it may 
take from ten to twenty minutes of actual 
physical union to consummate her feeling, while 
one, two or three minutes of actual union often 88 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
satisfies a man who is ignorant of the art of 
controlling his reactions so that he may ex- 
perience the added enjoyment of a mutual si- 
multaneous orgasm. 
A number of well-meaning people demand 
from men absolute “continence” save for pro- 
creation only. They overlook the innumerable 
physiological reactions concerned in the act, 
as well as the subtle spiritual alchemy of it, 
and propound the view that “the opposition 
to continence, save for procreation only, has but 
one argument to put forward, and that is ap- 
petite, selfishness.” (Mary Teats, “The Way 
of God in Marriage.”) 
It should be realized, however, that the com- 
plete act of union is a triple consummation. 
It symbolizes, and at the same time actually 
enhances, the spiritual union: there are a 
myriad subtleties of soul-structure which are 
compounded in this alchemy. At the same time 
the act gives the most intense physical pleasure 
which the body can experience, and it is a mu- 
tual not a selfish pleasure, more calculated than 
anything else to draw out an unspeakable ten- 
derness and understanding in both partakers 
of this sacrament; while thirdly, it is the act 
which gives rise to a new life by rendering pos- MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 
89 
sible the fusion of one of the innumerable male 
spermatozoa with the female egg-cell. 
It often happens, nowadays, that dreading the 
expense and the physical strain of child-bearing 
for his wife, the husband practices what is 
called coitus interruptus: that is, he withdraws 
just before the ejaculation, but when he is 
already so stimulated that the ejaculation has 
become involuntary. In this way the semen is 
spent, but, as it does not enter the wife’s body, 
fertilization and consequently procreation can- 
not take place. This practice, while it may have 
saved the woman the anguish of bearing un- 
wanted children, is yet very harmful to her, 
and is to be deprecated. It tends to leave the 
woman in “mid-air” as it were; to leave her 
stimulated and unsatisfied, and therefore it has 
a very bad effect on her nerves and general 
health, particularly if it is done frequently. 
The woman, too, loses the advantage (and I am 
convinced that it is difficult to overstate the 
physiological advantage) of the partial absorp- 
tion of the man’s secretions, which must take 
place through the large tract of internal epithe- 
lium with which they come in contact. If, as 
physiology has already proved to be the case, 
the internal absorption of secretions from the 90 
LOVE ENf MARRIAGE 
sex organs plays so large a part in determining 
the health and character of remote parts of the 
body, it is extremely likely that the highly 
stimulating secretion of man’s semen can and 
does penetrate and affect the woman’s whole 
organism. Actual experiment has shown that 
iodine placed in the vagina in solution is so 
quickly absorbed by the epithelial walls that 
in an hour it has penetrated the system and is 
even being excreted. It still remains, however, 
for scientific experiments to be devised which 
will enable us to study the effects of the ab- 
sorption of substances from the semen. On the 
other hand, coitus interruptus is not always 
harmful for the man, for he has the complete 
sex-act, though a good many men think its ef- 
fects on them are undesirable, and it may lead 
to lack of desire or even impotence. It is cer- 
tainly bad when its safety from consequences 
induces him to frequent indulgence, for thus 
wastefully to scatter what should be creative 
power is to reduce his own vitality and power 
of work. By those who have a high apprecia- 
tion of the value of their creative impulse, and 
who wish to enjoy the mutual pleasure and en- 
hancement of sex-union without wasting it, this 
method should not be practiced. MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 
91 
[Personal experience with thousands of men 
and hundreds of women who have been the vic- 
tims of coitus interruptus, coitus mcompletus 
or coitus prolongatus entitles the editor to 
speak with authority on the subject. It is hard 
to determine who, the man or the woman, is 
more seriously, more extensively injured by the 
practice; but my own impression is that it is 
the man. While, as a result of the practice, 
both may become afflicted with a lack of libido, 
or even a distaste and loathing of sex relations, 
tachycardia, neurasthenia, etc., there is one 
condition which may and often does affect the 
man, but from which the woman remains free, 
and that is: impotentia coeimdi. Atony and 
congestion of the prostate are also conditions 
from which the man alone suffers. 
As to absorption of the semen by the female 
genitals, no scientific proof exists that even ab- 
sorption takes place. Of the absorption by the 
vaginal epithelium there can be no question; 
there is some likelihood of absorption by the 
epithelium of the lining membrane of the uterus. 
But even here scientific proof is still lacking. 
The absorption of one’s own internal secre- 
tions is not an analogous case: Here the secre- 
tion is poured directly into one’s own blood or 92 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
lymph stream. But it is a fact that many 
women suffer intensely when in their sex rela- 
tions they are deprived of the semen, either 
through the practice of coitus interruptus or 
through the use of a condom. W. J. R.] 
It should never be forgotten that without the 
discipline of control there is no lasting delight 
in erotic feeling. The fullest delight, even in 
a purely physical sense, can only be attained by 
those who curb and direct their natural im- 
pulses. 
Dr. Saleeby’s words are appropriate in this 
connection: (Introduction to Forel’s “Sexual 
“Professor Forel speaks of subdu- 
ing the sexual instinct. I would rather speak 
of transmuting it. The direct method of at- 
tack is often futile, always necessitous of ef- 
fort, but it is possible for us to transmute our 
sex-energy into higher forms in our individual 
lives, thus justifying the evolutionary and 
physiological contention that is the source of 
the higher activities of men, of moral indig- 
nation, and of the ‘restless energy’ which has 
changed the surface of the earth.” 
Forel says (“The Sexual Question”): “Be- 
fore engaging in a life-long union, a man and 
woman ought to explain to each other their MUTUAL ADJUSTMENT 
93 
sexual feelings so as to avoid deception and in- 
compatibility later on.” This would be ad- 
mirable advice were it possible for a virgin 
girl to know much about the reactions and ef- 
fects upon her mind and body of the act of 
coitus, but she does not. Actually it often takes 
several years for eager and intelligent couples 
fully to probe themselves and to discover the 
extent and meaning of the immensely profound 
physiological and spiritual results of marriage. 
Yet it is true that a noble frankness would save 
much misery when, as happens not infrequent- 
ly, one or the other of the pair marries with 
the secret determination not to have any chil- 
dren. 
So various are we all as individuals, so com 
plex all the reactions and later-reactions of sex 
gelations, that no hard and fast rule can be laid 
down. Each couple, after marriage, must 
study themselves, and the lover and the beloved 
must do what best serves them both and gives 
them the highest degree of mutual joy and 
power. There are, however, some laws which 
should be inviolable. Their details can be gath- 
ered from the preceding pages, and they are 
summed up in the words: “Love worketh no ill 
to the beloved.” CHAPTER VI 
SLEEP 
"He giveth His beloved sleep." 
The healing magic of sleep is known to all. 
Sleeplessness is a punishment for so many 
different violations of nature’s laws, that it is 
perhaps one of the most prevalent of human- 
ity’s innumerable sufferings. While most of 
the aspects of sleep and sleeplessness have re- 
ceived much attention from specialists in human 
physiology, the relation between sleep and 
coitus appears to be but little realized. Yet 
there is an intimate, profound and quite direct 
relation between the power of sleep, naturally 
and refreshingly, and the harmonious relief of 
the whole system in the perfected sex-act. 
We see this very clearly in the case of the 
ordinary healthy man. If, for some reason, he 
has to live unsatisfied for some time after the 
acute stirring of his longing for physical con- 
94 SLEEP 
95 
tact with his wife, he tends to be wakeful, rest- 
less, and his nerves are on edge. 
Then, when the propitious hour arrives, and, 
after the love-play, the growing passion ex- 
pands, until the transports of rapture find their 
ending in the explosive completion of the act, 
at once the tension of his whole system relaxes, 
and his muscles fall into gentle, easy attitudes 
of languorous content, and in a few moments 
the man is sleeping like a child. 
This excellent and refreshing sleep falls like 
a soft curtain of oblivion and saves the man’s 
consciousness from the jar and disappointment 
of an anti-climax. But not only is this sleep a 
restorative after the strenuous efforts of the 
transport, it has peculiarly refreshing powers, 
and many men feel that after such a sleep their 
whole system seems rejuvenated. 
But how fare women in this event? When 
they too have had complete satisfaction they 
similarly relax and sink into a peaceful re- 
freshing slumber. 
But as things are to-day it is scarcely an 
exaggeration to say that the majority of wives 
are left wakeful and nerve-racked to watch with 
tender motherly brooding, or with bitter and 
jealous envy, the deep slumbers of the men who, 96 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
through ignorance and carelessness, have neg- 
lected to see that they too received full satis- 
faction. 
Many married women have told me that after 
relations with their husbands they are restless, 
either for some hours or for the whole night; 
and I feel sure that the prevalent neglect on 
the part of men to see that their wives have 
orgasms at each congress, must be a very com- 
mon source of the sleeplessness and nervous 
diseases of so many married women. 
The relation between the completion of the 
sex-act and sleep in woman is well indicated in 
the case of Mrs. A. who is typical of a large class 
of wives. She married a man with whom she 
was passionately in love. Neither she nor her 
husband had ever had connection with any one 
else, and, while they were both keen and in- 
telligent people with some knowledge of biology, 
neither knew anything of the details of the 
human sex union. For several years her hus- 
band had unions with her which gave him some 
satisfaction and left him ready at once to sleep. 
Neither he nor she knew that women should 
have an orgasm, and after every union she was 
left so “on edge,” restless and wakeful, so that 
several hours would generally elapse before SLEEP 
97 
she could sleep at all, and often she remained 
sleepless the whole night. 
After her husband’s death her health im- 
proved, and in a year or two she entered into 
a new relation with a man who was aware of 
woman’s needs and gave sufficient time and at- 
tention to them to insure a successful orgasm 
for her as well as for himself. The result was 
that she soon became a good sleeper, with the 
attendant benefits of restored nerves and 
health. 
Sleep is so complex a process, and sleepless- 
ness the resultant of so many different malad- 
justments, that it is, of course, possible that 
the woman may sleep well enough, even if she 
be deprived of the relief and pleasure of per- 
fect union. But in so many married women 
sleeplessness and a consequent nervous condi- 
tion are coupled with a lack of the complete sex 
relation, that one of the first questions a physi- 
cian should put to those of his women patients 
who are worn and sleepless is whether her hus- 
band really fulfills his marital duty in their 
physical relation. 
From their published statements, and their 
admissions to me, it appears that many prac- 
ticing doctors are either almost unaware of the 98 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
very existence of orgasm in women, or look 
upon it as a superfluous and accidental phenom- 
enon. Yet to have had a moderate number of 
orgasms at some time at least, is a necessity 
for the full development of a woman’s health 
and all her powers. 
As this book is written for those who are mar- 
ried, I say nothing here about the lives of those 
who are still unmarried, though, particularly 
after the age of thirty has been reached, their 
case may be very sad and need much study and 
consideration. It is, however, worth noticing 
how prevalent sleeplessness is among a class 
of women who have never practiced any self- 
indulgence or allowed any relief to their desires. 
There is little doubt that the complete lack of 
normal sex relations is one of the several fac- 
tors which render many middle-aged unmarried 
women nervous and sleepless. 
Yet for the unmarried woman the lack is not 
so acute nor so localized as it is for the mar- 
ried woman who is thwarted in the natural com- 
pletion of her sex-functions after they have been 
directly stimulated. 
The unmarried woman, unless she be in love 
with some particular man, has no definite 
stimulus to her sex desires beyond the natural SLEEP 
99 
upwelling of the sex urge. The married woman, 
however, is not only diffusely stirred by the 
presence of the man she loves, but is also acute- 
ly, locally and physically, stimulated by his re- 
lation with her. And if she is then left in mid- 
air, without natural relief to her tension, she 
is in this respect far worse off than her un- 
married sister. 
Nevertheless, many unmarried women suffer 
from sleeplessness as a result of their celibacy, 
quite unconscious of its cause. 
We are, however, only concerned here with 
the married woman. When she is left sleep- 
less through the neglect of the mate who slum- 
bers soundly by her side, it is not surprising 
if she spends the long hours reviewing their 
mutual position; and the review cannot yield 
her much pleasure or satisfaction. For de- 
prived of the physical delight of mutual orgasm 
(though perhaps, like so many wives, quite un- 
conscious of all it can give), she sees in the sex 
act an arrangement where pleasure, relief and 
subsequent sleep are all on her husband’s side, 
while she is merely the passive instrument of 
his enjoyment. Nay, more than that: if fol- 
lowing every union she has long hours of wake- 
fulness, she then sees clearly the encroachment 100 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
on her own health of an arrangement in which 
she is not merely passive, but is actively abused. 
Another of the consequences of the incom- 
plete relation is that often, stirred to a point 
of wakefulness and vivacity by the preliminary 
sex-stimulation (of the full meaning of which 
she may be unconscious), a romantic and 
thoughtful woman is then most able to talk in- 
timately and tenderly—to speak of the things 
most near and sacred to her heart. And she 
may then be terribly wounded by the inatten- 
tion of her husband, which, coming so soon af- 
ter his ardent demonstrations of affection, ap- 
pears peculiarly callous. It makes him appear 
to her to be indifferent to the highest side of 
marriage—the spiritual and romantic inter- 
course. Thus she may see in the man going off 
to sleep in the midst of her love-talk, a gross 
and inattentive brute—and all because she has 
never shared the climax of his physical tension, 
and does not know that its natural reaction is 
sleep. 
These thoughts are so depressing even to the 
tenderest and most loving woman, and so bitter 
to one who has other causes of complaint, that 
in their turn they act on the whole system and SLEEP 
101 
increase the damage done by the mere sleep- 
lessness. 
The older school of physiologists dealt in 
methods too crude to realize the physiological 
results of our thoughts, but it is now well known 
that anger and bitterness have experimentally 
recognizable physiological effects, and are in- 
jurious to the whole system. 
It requires little imagination to see that after 
months or years of such embittered sleepless- 
ness, the woman tends not only to become neu- 
rasthenic but also resentful toward her hus- 
band. She is probably too ignorant and unob- 
servant of her own physiology to realize the 
full meaning of what is taking place, but she 
feels vaguely that he is to blame, and that she 
is being sacrificed for what, in her still greater 
ignorance of his physiology, seems to her to be 
his mere pleasure and self-indulgence. 
He, with his health maintained by the natural 
outlet followed by recuperative sleep, is not 
likely to be ready to look into the gloomy and 
shadowy land of vague reproach and inexplic- 
able trivial wrongs which are all the expression 
she gives to her unformulated physical griev- 
ance. So he is likely to set down any resent- 
ment she may show to “nerves” or “captious- 102 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
ness”; and to be first solicitous of and then im- 
patient towards her apparently irrelevant com- 
plaints. 
If he is, as many men are, tender and con- 
siderate, he may try to remedy matters by re- 
stricting to the extreme limit of what is ab- 
solutely necessary for him, the number of times 
they come together. Unconsciously he thus only 
makes matters worse; for as a general rule, he 
is quite unaware of his wife’s rhythm, and does 
not arrange to coincide with it in his infre- 
quent tender embraces. As he is now prob- 
ably sleeping in another room and not daring to 
come for the nightly talks and tenderness which 
are so sweet a privilege of marriage, here, as 
in other ways, his well-meaning but wrongly 
conceived efforts at restraint only tend to drive 
the pair still further apart. 
To make plain the reasonableness of my view 
regarding sleep, it is necessary to mention 
some of the immensely profound influences 
which it is now known that sex exerts, even 
when not stimulated to its specific use. 
In those who are deprived of their sex-organs, 
particularly when young, many of the other fea- 
tures and organs of the body develop abnor- 
mally or fail to appear. Castrated boys SLEEP 
103 
(Eunuchs) when grown up, tend to have little 
or no beard, or mustache, to have high-pitched 
voices and several other characters which 
separate them from normal men. 
The growth of organs and structures so re- 
mote from the sex-organs as, e. g., the larynx 
have been found to be influenced by the chemi- 
cal stimulus of secretions from the sex organs 
and their subsidiary glands. These secretions 
are not passed out through external ducts but 
enter the blood system directly. Such secre- 
tions passing straight from the ductless glands 
into the vascular system are of very great im- 
portance in almost all our bodily functions. 
They have been deeply studied of late, and the 
general name of Hormones given to them by 
Starling.1 The idea that some particular se- 
cretions or “humors” are connected with each 
of the internal organs of the body, is a very 
ancient one; but we have even yet only the 
vaguest and most elementary knowledge of a 
few of the many miracles performed by these 
subtle chemical substances. Thus we know that 
the stimulus of food in the stomach sends a 
chemical substance from one ductless gland in 
1 See Prof. Ernest H. Starling’■ Croon ian Lecture to the 
Royal Society, 1905. 104 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
the digestive system chasing through the Wood 
to another gland which prepares a different di- 
gestive secretion further on. We know that the 
thyroid gland in the neck swells and contracts 
in very sensitive relation with the sex organs; 
we know that some chemical secretion from 
the developing embryo, or the tissue in which 
it grows, sends its chemical stimulus to the 
distant mammary glands of the mother; we 
know that if the ovaries of a girl or the testes 
of a boy are completely cut out, the far-reach- 
ing influences their hormones would have 
exerted are made evident by the numerous 
changes in the system and departures from the 
normal, which result from their lack. 
But we do not know, for physiologists have 
not yet studied the degree and character of 
the immense stimulus of sex-life and experi- 
ence on the glands of the sex-organs, or how 
they affect the whole of the human being’s life 
and powers. 
The “Mendelians” and the “Mutationists” 
who both tend to lay so much (and I think such 
undue) stress on morphological hereditary fac- 
tors, seem at present to have the ear of the 
public more than the physiologists. But it is 
more important that every grown up man and SLEEP 
105 
woman should know that through the various 
chemical substances or “messengers” (which 
Starling calls the hormones) there is an ex- 
tremely rapid, almost immediate, effect on the 
activities of organs in remote parts of the body, 
due to the influences exerted on one or another 
internal organ. 
It is therefore clear that any influences ex- 
erted on such profoundly important organs as 
those connected with sex, must have far-reach- 
ing results in many unexpected fields. 
What must be taking place in the female sys- 
tem as a result of the completed sex act"? 
It is true that in coitus woman has but a 
slight external secretion, and that principally 
of mucus. But we have no external signs of 
all the complex processes and reactions going 
on in digestion and during the production of 
digestive secretions. When, as is the case in 
orgasm, we have such intense and apparent 
nervous, vascular and muscular reactions, it 
seems inevitable that there must be correspond- 
ingly profound internal correlations. Is it 
conceivable that organs so fundamental, whose 
mere existence we know affects the personal 
characters of women, could escape physiologi- 106 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
cal result, from the intense preliminary stimulus 
and acute sensations of an orgasm? 
To ask this question is surely to answer it. 
It is to my mind inconceivable that the orgasm 
in woman as in man should not have profound 
physiological effects. Did we know enough 
about the subject, many of the “nervous break- 
downs” and neurotic tendencies of the modern 
woman could be directly traced to the partial 
stimulation of sexual intercourse without its 
normal completion which is so prevalent in 
modern marriage. 
This subject, and its numerous ramifications, 
are well worth the careful research of the most 
highly trained physiologists. There is nothing 
more profound, or of more vital moment to 
modern humanity as a whole, than is the un- 
derstanding of the sex nature and sex needs of 
men and women. 
I may point out as a mere suggestion that 
the man’s sex organs give rise to external and 
also to internal secretions. The former only 
leave the glands which secrete them as a result 
of definite stimulus; the latter appear to be 
perpetually exuded in small quantities and al- 
ways to be entering and influencing the whole 
system. In woman we know there are corre- SLEEP 
107 
sponding perpetual internal secretions, and it 
seems evident to me that there must be some 
internal secretions which are only released un- 
der the definite stimulus of the whole sex-act. 
The English and American peoples, who lead 
the world in so many ways, have an almost un- 
precedentedly high proportion of married 
women who get no satisfaction from physical 
union with their husbands, though they bear 
children, and may in every other respect ap- 
pear to be happily married. 
The modern civilized neurotic woman has be- 
come a by-word in the Western world. Why? 
I am certain that much of this suffering is 
caused by the ignorance of both men and women 
regarding not only the inner physiology, but 
even the obvious outward expression, of the 
complete sex-act. 
Many medical men now recognize that numer- 
ous nervous and other diseases are associated 
with the lack of physiological relief for natural 
or stimulated sex feelings in women. Ellis 
(“Sex in Relation to Society,” 1910, p. 551) 
quotes the opinion of an Austrian gynecologist 
who said that, “of every hundred women who 
come to him with uterine troubles, seventy 
suffer from congestion of the womb, which he 108 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
regarded as due to incomplete coitus.” While 
a writer in the British Medical Journal (April 
1, 1911, p. 784) published some cases in which 
quite serious nervous diseases in wives were 
put right when their husbands were cured of 
too hasty ejaculation. 
Sleep, concerning which I began this chapter, 
is but one of innumerable indications of inner 
processes intimately bound up with the sex- 
reactions. When the sex-rite is, in every sense, 
rightly performed, the healing wings of sleep 
descend both on the man and on the woman in 
his arms. Every organ in their bodies is in- 
fluenced and stimulated to play its part, while 
their spirits, after soaring in the dizzy heights 
of rapture, are wafted to oblivion, thence to 
return gently to the ordinary plains of daily 
consciousness. CHAPTEB VII 
MODESTY AND ROMANCE 
"A person can therefore no more promise to love or not to 
love than he can promise to live long. What he can promise 
is to take good care of his life and of his love.”—Ellen Key. 
Artists clearly, and poets in veiled language, 
have in all ages expressed the glory of the 
naked human body. Before the Venus of Milo 
in her Paris home, even the empty-headed and 
ridiculously dressed creatures of fashion stand 
for a moment with a catch in the throat and a 
sense that here is something full of divine 
secrets. One day, when I was doing my rever- 
ence before this ancient goddess, drinking in 
strength and happiness from the harmonies of 
her curves, a preposterously corseted doll 
oame up to the statue, paused, and said with 
tears in her voice to the man beside her: 
“Hasn’t she got the loveliest figure!” 
If cold marble so stirs us, how much more 
the warmth and vitality of living beauty! Any 
well-formed young man or woman is immeasur- 
109 110 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
ably more graceful when free from the clinging 
follies of modem dress, while a beautiful 
woman’s body has a supernal loveliness at 
which no words short of poetic rapture can 
even hint. What wonder then that one of the 
ecstasies of love should be the unveiling of the 
beloved ? 
A man or woman perfectly naked cannot be 
tawdry. The fripperies, the jagged curves and 
inharmonious lines and colors of the so-called 
“adornments” are surmounted, and the naked 
figure stepping from their scattered pile is 
seen in its utter simplicity. How charming 
even the raggedest little street urchins become 
when they leave their rags on the bank and 
plunge into the water 1 
It is therefore not surprising that one of the 
innumerable sweet impulses of love should be 
to reveal, each to each, this treasure of living 
beauty: To give each other the right to enter 
and enjoy the sight which most of all sights 
in the world draws and satisfies the artist’s 
eyes. 
This impulse, however, is, on the part of the 
woman, swayed by two at least of the natural 
results of her rhythmic tides. For some time 
during each month, age-long tradition that she MODESTY AND ROMANCE 
111 
is ‘ ‘ unclean, ’ ’ coupled with her obvious require- 
ments, have made her withdraw herself from 
even her husband’s gaze. But on the other 
hand there comes the time before menstrua- 
tion when her body is raised to a higher point 
of loveliness than usual by the rounding and 
extra fullness of the breasts. (This is one of 
the regular physiological results of the pro- 
cesses going on within her, of which menstrua- 
tion is only the outward sign.) Partly or 
wholly unconscious of the brilliance and full 
perfection of her beauty, she yet delights in its 
gentle promptings to reveal itself to her lover’s 
eyes when he adores. This innocent, this god- 
dess-like self-confidence retreats when the nat- 
ural ebb of her vitality returns. 
How fortunate for man when these sweet 
changes in his beloved are not coerced into uni- 
formity! For man has still so much of the 
ancient hunter in his blood, that beauty which 
is always at hand and ever upon its pedestal, 
must inevitably attract him far less than the 
elusive and changing charms of rhythmic life. 
In the highly evolved and cultivated woman, 
who has wisdom enough not to restrict but to 
give full play to the great rhythms of her being, 
man’s polygamous instinct can be satisfied and 112 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
charmed by the ever-changing aspects of her- 
self which naturally come uppermost. And 
one of her natural phases is at times to retreat, 
to experience a profound sex indifference, and 
passionately to resent any encroachment on her 
solitude. 
This is something woman too often forgets. 
She has been so thoroughly “domesticated” by 
man that she feels too readily that after mar- 
riage she is all his. And by her very docility 
to his perpetual demands, she destroys for him 
the elation, the palpitating thrills and surprises, 
of the chase. 
In the rather trivial terms of our sordid 
modern life, it works out in many marriages 
somewhat as follows: The married pair share 
a bed-room, often even a bed (though this de- 
testable habit is fortunately rapidly decreas- 
ing) and so it comes about that the two are 
together not only at the times of delight and 
interest in each other, but during most of the 
unlovely and even ridiculous proceedings of the 
toilet. Now, it may enchant a man once—per- 
haps even twice—or at long intervals—to watch 
his goddess screw her hair up into a tight and 
unbecoming knot and soap her ears. But it is 
inherently too unlovely a proceeding to retain MODESTY AND ROMANCE 
113 
indefinite enchantment. To see her floating in 
the deep clear water of her bath—that may 
enchant forever, for it is so lovely, but the un- 
beautiful trivialities essential to the cleaning 
processes of a bath, tend only to dim the picture 
and, if repeated, to dull the interest and at- 
tention that should be bestowed on the body of 
the loved one. Hence, ultimately, everyday 
association in the commonplace daily necessi- 
ties, tends to reduce the keen pleasure each 
takes in the sight of the other. And hence, 
inevitably and tragically though stealthily and 
unperceived, to reduce the keenness of stimula- 
tion the pair exert on each other, and thus to 
lower their intensity of pleasure in the sex act.1 
*A quotation from W. J. Thomas, “Sex and Society,” is 
here very apt, though he had been speaking not of man, but 
of the love play and coyness shown by female birds and 
animals. 
“We must also recognize the fact that reproductive life 
must be connected with violent stimulation, or it would be 
neglected and the species would become extinct; and on the 
other hand if the conquest of the female were too easy, sexual 
life would be in danger of becoming a play interest and a 
dissipation, destructive of energy and fatal to the species. 
Working, we may assume, by a process of selection and sur- 
vival, nature has both secured and safe guarded reproduction. 
The female will not submit to seizure except in a high state 
of nervous excitation (as is seen especially well in the wooing 
of birds), while the male must conduct himself in such a way 
as to manipulate the female; and, as the more active agent, he 114 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
In short, the overcoming of her personal 
modesty which is generally looked on as an es- 
sential result in marriage where the woman be- 
comes wholly the man’s, has generated among 
our women a tradition that before their hus- 
bands they can perform any and all of the de- 
tails of personal and domestic duties. Cor- 
respondingly, they allow the man to be neg- 
lectful of preserving some reticence before 
them. This mutual possession of the lower and 
more elementary experiences of life has been, 
in innumerable marriages, a factor in destroy- 
ing the mutual possession of life’s higher and 
more poetic charms. 
In this respect I am inclined to think that man 
suffers more than woman. For man is still 
essentially the hunter, the one who experiences 
the desires and thrills of the chase, and dreams 
ever of coming unawares upon Diana in the 
woodlands. On the other hand, the married 
woman, having once yielded all, tends to re- 
main passively in the man’s companionship. 
Though it may appear trivial beside the pro- 
develops a marvellous display of technique for this purpose. 
This is offset by the coyness and coquetry of the female, by 
which she equally attracts and fascinates the male, and prac- 
tices upon him to induce a corresponding state of nervous 
excitation. ’ ’ MODESTY AND ROMANCE 
115 
found physiological factors considered in re- 
cent chapters, I think that, in the interest of 
husbands, an important piece of advice to wives 
is: Be always escaping. Escape the lower, the 
trivial, the sordid. So far as possible (and this 
is far more possible than appears at first, and 
requires only a little care and rearrangement 
in the habits of the household) ensure that you 
allow your husband to come upon you only when 
there is delight in the meeting. A fleeting 
glimpse of mutinous face as you lock yourself 
in the bathroom, is far kinder to a man than 
the wifely docility of sharing a toilet table and 
washstand. CHAPTER VIII 
ABSTINENCE 
*‘How intoxicating indeed, how penetrating—like a most 
precious wine—is that love which is the sexual transformed 
by the magic of the will into the emotional and spiritual! 
And what a loss on the merest grounds of prudence and the 
economy of pleasure is its unbridled waste along physical chan- 
nels! So nothing is so much to be dreaded between lovers 
as just this—the vulgarisation of love—and this is the rock 
upon which marriage so often splits.—Edwarb Carpenter. 
And because marriage so often splits upon 
this rock, or because men and women have in 
all ages yearned for spiritual beauty, there 
have been those who have shut themselves off 
from all the sweet usages of the body. In the 
struggle of man to gain command over his body, 
and in the slow and often backsliding evolution 
of the higher love, there is no doubt that hu- 
manity owes much to the ascetic. But this 
debt is in the past. We are now gaining con- 
trol of the lower forces, we are winning knowl- 
edge of the complex meanings and the spiritual 
transformations of our physical reactions, and 
116 ABSTINENCE 
117 
in the future the highest social unit will be 
recognized to be the pair, fused in love so that 
all human potentialities are theirs, as well as 
the higher potentialities which only perfect love 
can originate. 
Yet, as we live to-day, with still so many 
remnants of the older standards within and 
upon us, we must endeavor to understand the 
ascetic. He (less often she) is by no means 
seldom one of the products of marriage. It 
not infrequently happens that after a love-mar- 
riage and some years of what is considered 
happiness, the man or woman may withdraw 
from the sex-life, often looking down upon it, 
and considering that they have reached a higher 
plane by so doing. But such people seldom ask 
themselves if, while they lived it, they reached 
the highest possible level of the sex-life. 
One of the most famous instances of the mar- 
ried ascetic is Tolstoy, whose later opinion was 
that the highest human being completely inhib- 
its his sex-desires and lives a celibate life. 
Ascetics, however, seldom have much knowledge 
of human physiology, and it seems to me that 
with all their fine and religious fervor, they 
often lack the mysticism necessary for the full 
realization of the meaning and potentialities 118 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
of the new creation resulting from man’s and 
woman’s highest union. Doubtless if for an 
hour we were to take the place of the individ- 
ual chemical atoms of Oxygen or of Hydrogen, 
we could have no inkling of the physical prop- 
erties of the water-drop they together form. 
Christianity, like most religions, had a strong 
wave of asceticism early in its history. While 
there was, as there still is, a harsh asceticism 
which is hostile to the other sex, it is of much 
interest to see that there was also a romantic 
asceticism which, while revolting from the sen- 
suality of its pagan contemporaries, did not en- 
tirely prohibit the charms and pleasures of 
mutual companionship. Thus, in a mutilated 
form, it seems, these early Christian ascetics 
gained some of the immaterial benefits of mar- 
riage. Ellis (“Sex and Society”) gives an in- 
teresting account of these ascetic love-unions: 
“Our fathers,” Chrysostom begins (“Against 
those who keep Virgins in their Houses”) only knew 
two forms of sexual intimacy, marriage and fornica- 
tion. Now a third form has appeared: men intro- 
duce young girls into their houses and keep them 
there permanently, respecting their virginity. 
“What,” Chrysostom asks, “is the reason? It seems 
to me that life in common with a woman is sweet, even ABSTINENCE 
119 
outside conjugal union and fleshly commerce. That 
is my feeling; and perhaps it is not my feeling alone; 
it may also be that of these men. They would not 
hold their honor so cheap nor give rise to such scandals 
if this pleasure were not violent and tyrannical. . . . 
That there should really be a pleasure in this which 
produces a love more ardent than conjugal union may 
surprise you at first. But when I give you the proofs 
you will agree that it is so.” The absence of re- 
straint to desire in marriage, he continues, often leads 
to speedy disgust, and even apart from this, sexual 
intercourse, pregnaney, delivery, lactation, the bring- 
ing up of children, and all the pains and anxieties that 
accompany these things, soon destroy youth and dull 
the point of pleasure. The virgin is free from these 
burdens. She retains her vigor and her youthfulness, 
and even at the age of forty may rival the young 
nubile girl. “A double ardor thus bums in the heart 
of him who lives with her, and the gratification of 
desire never extinguishes the bright flame which ever 
continues to increase in strength.” Chrysostom de- 
scribes minutely all the little cares and attentions 
which the modern girls of his time required, and 
which these men delighted to expend on their virginal 
sweethearts whether in public or in private. He can- 
not help thinking, however, that the man who lavishes 
kisses and caresses on a woman whose virginity he 
retains is putting himself somewhat in the position of 120 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
Tantalus. But this new refinement of tender chastity, 
which came as a delicious discovery to the early Chris- 
tians who resolutely thrust away the licentiousness 
of the pagan world, was deeply rooted, as we discover 
from the frequency with which the grave Fathers of 
the Church, apprehensive of scandal, felt called upon 
to reprove it, though their condemnation is sometimes 
not without a trace of secret sympathy. 
“Thus Jerome, in his letter to Eustochium, refers 
to those couples who ‘share the same room,’ often 
even the same bed, and call us suspicious if we draw 
any conclusions; while Cyprian (Epistala, 86) is un- 
able to approve of those men he hears of, one a dea- 
con, who live in familiar intercourse with virgins, 
even sleeping in the same bed with them, for, he de- 
clares the feminine sex is weak and youth is wanton. ’ ’ 
The harsh ascetic, however, is the one the 
word ascetic most generally conjures up. Even 
if he accomplishes miracles of self-restraint, 
and subdues desire, he is often weakened rather 
than strengthened by his determination to flout 
nature. Save only in the truly great, there is 
a warping and narrowing which results from 
coercing beyond the limits of reason the desires 
which were implanted in Adam and Eve when 
they were told to be fruitful and multiply. ABSTINENCE 
121 
As Ellen Key says (“Love and Marriage”): 
“Those ascetics who recommend only self-control 
as a remedy for the mastery of sexual instinct, even 
when such control becomes merely obstructive to life, 
are like the physician who tried only to drive the 
fever out of his patient: it was nothing to him that 
the sick man died of the cure. 
‘ ‘ But these ascetics may have arrived at their fanat- 
icism by two different paths. One group—which in- 
cludes most of the female ascetics—hates Cupid be- 
cause he has never shown to them any favor. The 
other group—embracing the majority of male ascetics 
—curses him because he never leaves them in peace.” 
Approaching the subject in a more modern 
and scientific attitude of impartial inquiry, the 
medical man can produce an imposing list of 
diseases 1 more or less directly caused by ab- 
stinence both in men and in women. These dis- 
eases range from neuralgia and “nerves” to 
actual fibroid growths. And it is well worthy of 
remark that these diseases may be present when 
the patient (as have many unmarried women) 
has no idea that the sex-impulse exists unmas- 
tered. 
11 should prefer to use the word * ‘ disorders ’ ’ iastead of 
diseases. As to fibroid tumors as a result of abstinence—ae 
scientific authentic data are available on this point. 122 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
Thus the ascetic and the profligate (whether 
or not in legal marriage) have both to run the 
gauntlet of disease. There is, however, no dis- 
ease I know of which is caused by the normal 
and mutually happy marriage relation—a rela- 
tion which certainly to most has positive heal- 
ing and vitalizing power. 
The profound truth which is perceived by the 
ascetics is that the creative energy of sex can 
be transformed into other activities. This 
truth should never be lost sight of in marriage; 
the periods of complete abstinence, between the 
times of natural, happy, and also stimulating 
exercise of the sex-functions, should be oppor- 
tunities for transmuting the healthy sex-power 
into work of every sort CHAPTER IX 
CHILDREN 
I am for you, and you are for me, 
Not only for our own sake, but for others * sakes, 
Envelop’d in you sleep greater heroes and bards, 
.They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me. 
—Walt Whitman. 
The Mystic in his moment of enlightenment 
attains through the flux of his personality the 
realization of oneness with the divine forces of 
the Universe. 
To ordinary men and women, however, this 
mystical ecstasy is unknown, and the ordinary 
human consciousness is far more aware of its 
separateness than of its oneness with the vital 
forces of creation. Yet the glow of half swoon- 
ing rapture in which the Mystic’s whole being 
melts and floats in the light of the divine force 
is paralleled in the rapture of lovers. 
When two who are mated in every respect 
burn with the fire of the innumerable forces 
within them, which set their bodies longing to- 
123 124 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
ward each other with the desire to interpene- 
trate and to encompass one another, the fusion 
joy and rapture is not purely physical. The 
half swooning sense of flux which overtakes the 
spirit in that moment at the apex of rapture 
sweeps into its tides the whole essence of the 
man and woman, and as it were, the heat of the 
contact vaporizes their consciousness so that it 
fills the whole of cosmic space. For the 
moment they are identified with the divine 
thoughts, the waves of eternal force, which to 
the Mystic often appear in terms of golden 
light. 
From their mutual penetration into the 
realms of supreme joy, the two lovers bring 
back with them a spark of that light which we 
call life. 
And unto them a child is bom. 
This is the supreme purpose of nature in all 
her enticing weft of complex factors luring the 
two lovers into each other’s arms. Only by the 
fusion of two can the new human life come into 
being, and only by creating a new life in this 
way can we hand on the torch which lights our 
consciousness in the sphere of matter. 
This mystical and wonderful fact has never 
yet found the poet to sing its full glory. But CHILDREN 
125 
in the hearts of all who have known trne love 
lies the realization of the sacredness that is 
theirs when they are in the very act of crea- 
tion. 
Were our bodies specifically organized for 
this supreme purpose, two human beings would 
only pass through the sacred fire of mutual 
fusion in order to create a new life. But, how- 
ever far our spirits have evolved, our bodies 
are composed of matter which bears the im- 
print of the many past phases through which 
we have reached our present position. And be- 
cause in the world of the lower animals there is 
an immense wastage of all the young lives cre- 
ated, and it is necessary that myriads should be 
conceived in order that a small number should 
reach maturity, so in our bodies (specialized 
though they are in comparison with the lower 
animals) both sexes still produce a far larger 
number of germs awaiting fertilization than 
can be actually fructified and imbued with in- 
dividual life. 
It is utterly impossible, organized as our 
bodies are at present, for us to obey the dic- 
tates of theologians and refrain from the wast- 
ing of potential life. The germ cells of the 
woman, though immeasurably less numerous 126 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
than the male germ cells (the spermatozoa), yet 
develop uselessly over and over again in every 
celibate as well as in every married woman. 
And myriads of sperm cells are destroyed even 
in the process of the act which does ensure fer- 
tilization of the woman by the single favored 
spermatozoon. If the theologians really mean 
what they say, and demand the voluntary ef- 
fort of complete celibacy from all men, save 
for the purpose of procreation, this will not 
achieve their end of preventing the wastage 
of all potential life; and the monthly loss of 
unfertilized ova by women is beyond all the ef- 
forts of the will to curb. Nature, not man, ar- 
ranged the wastage of potential life against 
which ascetic bishops rage. 
If, then, throughout the greater part of their 
lives the germinal cells of both sexes inevitably 
disintegrate without creating an embryo, there 
can be nothing wrong in selecting the most fa- 
vorable moment possible for the conception of 
a new life. 
What generally happens in marriage where 
this is not thought of is that one of the very 
earliest unions results in the fertilization of the 
wife, so that the young pair have a baby nine 
months, or a little more, after marriage. CHILDREN 
127 
Whereas, were they wise and did they real- 
ize the full significance of what they were doing, 
they would allow at least six months or a year 
to elapse before beginning the supreme task of 
their lives, the burden of which falls mainly 
upon the woman. 
For many reasons it is more ideal to have 
the children spontaneously and early; but if 
economic conditions are hard, as they so often 
are in “civilized” life, it may be better to marry 
and defer the children rather than not to marry. 
If the pair married very young, and before 
they could afford to support children, they 
might wait several years with advantage. An 
exceptional case is one of the happiest mar- 
riages I know. The pair married while they 
were young students in the University, and 
fourteen years later they had their first child, 
a splendidly healthy boy. Though such a long 
interval is certainly not to be universally recom- 
mended, as it is said that it may result in steril- 
ity [preventive measures in themselves never 
lead to sterility. W. J. R.], in this instance it 
was triumphantly better for the two to have 
lived normally satisfied happy lives than to have 
waited for fourteen years, and risked the man’s 
“fall.” 128 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
There are many reasons, both for their own 
and for the child’s sake, why the potential par- 
ents should take the wise precaution of delay, 
unless owing to special circumstances they can- 
not expect to live together uninterruptedly. 
The child, conceived in rapture and hope, 
should be given every material chance which 
the wisdom and love of the parents can devise. 
And the first and most vital condition of its 
health is that the mother should be well and 
happy and free from anxiety while she bears it. 
The tremendous and far-reaching effects of 
marriage on the woman’s whole organism make 
her less fitted to bear a child at the very com- 
mencement of marriage than later on when the 
system will have adjusted itself to its new con- 
ditions and she will have regained her poise and 
normal health. 
Not only for the sake of the child, however, 
should the first conception be a little delayed, 
but also to secure the lasting happiness of the 
married lovers. It is generally (though per- 
haps not always) wise thoroughly to establish 
their relation to each other before introducing 
the inevitable dislocation and readjustment ne- 
cessitated by the wife’s pregnancy and the birth 
of a child. CHILDREN 
129 
In this book I am not speaking so much of the 
universal sex relation, as to those who find 
themselves to-day in the highly civilized, arti- 
ficial communities of English speaking people: 
and in our present society there is little doubt 
that the early birth of a child demands much 
self-sacrifice and self-restraint from the man, 
one of the reflex vibrations of which is his un- 
definable sense of loss and separation from his 
bride. This has been confided to me by many 
men who have been generous enough to trust 
me with some of the secrets of their lives. Mr. 
C. is typical of many others of his class. 
He was quiet and refined with a strong strain 
of romantic love, which was entirely centered 
in his bride. He was manly and sufficiently 
virile to feel the need of sex intercourse, but 
he was unaware (as are so many men) of the 
woman’s corresponding need; and he did not 
give his wife any orgasm. She took no pleasure 
therefore in the physical act of union, which 
for her was so incomplete. 
Very shortly after marriage she conceived, 
and a child was bom ten months after the wed- 
ding day. 
For two years after the birth of the child 
her vitality was so lowered and the sex act was 130 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
to her so repugnant that she refused her hus- 
band any union; and it was thus three years 
after their marriage before they met in any- 
thing like a normal way. By that time the long 
separation from sex-life, and the strain on the 
man, coupled with daily familiarity at home, 
had dimmed, if not completely destroyed, his 
sense of romance. The natural stimulation 
each should exert on the other had faded, so 
that they never experienced the mutual glow of 
intense rapture in their sex-union. 
Another pair suffered similarly: Mr. and 
Mrs. D. were prevented for several years by 
the wife’s real and fancied ill-health from hav- 
ing any intercourse. When, after that time, 
she recovered and passionately desired the true 
marriage relation, the husband felt it to be im- 
possible. To him it would have been, as he 
expressed it, “like raping his sister.” 
Once such a thought has grown into a man’s 
mind it is very difficult “to recapture the first 
early rapture.” And with the loss of that 
early rapture the two lose, for the rest of their 
lives, the irradiating joy which is priceless not 
only for its beauty, but for the vitality with 
which its wings are laden. 
On the other hand, if by waiting some months CHILDREN 
131 
(or even years if they are yonng) the mated 
pair have learnt to adjust themselves to each 
other and have experienced the full and su- 
preme rapture of complete love-making, the 
disturbance which is caused by the birth of the 
child is in no sense a danger to their happiness, 
but is its crown and completion. 
A man once said to me—one can endure any- 
thing for the sake of a beloved wife. But the 
wife is only utterly beloved when she and her 
married lover have not only entered paradise 
together, but when she fully realizes, through 
insight gained by her own experiences, the true 
nature of that of which she is depriving her 
husband so long as her bodily condition makes 
sex-unions with him impossible. 
Much has been written, and may be found in 
the innumerable books on the sex-problems, as 
to whether a man and woman should or should 
not have relations while the wife is bearing an 
unborn child. In this matter experience is very 
various, so that it is difficult or impossible to 
give definite advice without knowing the full 
circumstances of each case. 
When, however, we observe the admirable 
sanctity of the pregnant females of the wood- 
land creatures, and when we consider the ex- 132 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
traordinary ignorance and disregard of wom- 
an’s needs which mark so many of our modern 
customs, we cannot hut think that the safe side 
of this debatable question must be in the com- 
plete continence of the woman for at least six 
months before the birth of the child. I have 
heard from a number of women, however, that 
they desire union urgently at this time, and 
from others that the thought of it is incredible. 
[To demand complete continence for at least 
six months before the child is born is entirely 
too severe a requirement. As a woman should 
for several reasons wait six weeks or two 
months after the birth of the child before re- 
suming sex relations, it follows that with each 
pregnancy the husband would have to be absti- 
nent for a period of about eight months. Such 
complete abstinence would be for some hus- 
bands difficult, for some unbearable. For some 
it might result in very unpleasant complica- 
tions. Nor is it so easy for all wives during 
the acme of their sex lives to abstinent for 
eight months, especially if we bear in mind that 
with some women the sex-urge is extremely in- 
sistent during pregnancy. No, such abstinence 
is unnecessary. Six weeks to two months of 
abstinence before and the same period after the CHILDREN 
133 
birth of a child is quite sufficient, and proper, 
and will not injure husband, wife or child.—See 
Chapter: Intercourse During Pregnancy in the 
Editor’s “Women—Her Sex and Love Life.” 
W. J. R.] 
Tolstoy strongly condemned any sex-contact 
while the wife was pregnant or nursing and 
blamed the husband who “puts upon her the 
unbearable burden of being at one and the same 
time a mistress, an exhausted mother, and a 
sickly, irritable, hysterical individual. And the 
husband loves her as his mistress, ignores her 
as a mother, and hates her for the irritability 
and hysteria which he himself has produced and 
produces.” His view is taken by many of our 
noblest men. 
While the wife feels that she cannot allow her 
husband to enter the portals of her body when it 
has become the sacred temple of a developing 
life, she should also consider the perpetual 
strain which nature imposes upon him; and the 
tender and loving wife will readily find some 
means of giving him that physical relief which 
his nature needs. 
The exquisite unselfish tenderness which is 
aroused in a man by the sense of mental and 
spiritual harmony with a wife who sympathizes 134 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
with, because she understands his needs, is one 
of the loveliest things in marriage. A wife 
who knows how to waken this tenderness in a 
man raises him out of the self-centered slough 
in which so many men wallow unhappily. 
With an ardent man, wholly devoted to his 
wife and long deprived of her, the time will 
come when it will be sufficient for him to be 
near her and caress her for relief to take place 
without any physical connection, if, as every 
wife should, she has retained after marriage 
that dainty modesty which renders the sight of 
her bosom and of her beauty a privilege and a 
joy to her husband. 
After the birth of the first child the health 
of the mother and of the baby both demand that 
there should be no hurried beginning of a sec- 
ond. At least a year should pass before the 
second little life is allowed to begin its unfold- 
ing, so that a minimum of about two years 
should elapse before the second child is born. 
The importance of this, both for the mother 
and for the child, is generally adequately rec- 
ognized by medical specialists, and some distin- 
guished gynecologists advocate as much as three 
or five years between the births of successive 
children. While in the whole human relation CHILDREN 
135 
there is no slavery or torture so horrible as co- 
erced, unwilling motherhood, there is no joy and 
pride greater than that of a woman who is bear- 
ing the developing child of a man she adores. 
It is a serious reflection on our poisoned “civili- 
zation” that a pregnant woman should feel 
shame to appear in the streets. Never will the 
race reach true health till it is cured of its 
prurient sickness, and the prospective mother 
can carry her sacred burden as a priestess in a 
triumphal procession. 
Of the innumerable problems which touch 
upon the qualities transmitted to the children 
by their parents, the study of which may be cov- 
ered by the general term Eugenics, I shall here 
say nothing: nor shall I deal with the problems 
of birth and child-rearing. Many writers have 
considered these subjects, and my purpose in 
this book is to present aspects of sex-life which 
have been more or less neglected by others. 
While throughout I have omitted the consid- 
eration of abnormalities, there is one condition 
which verges on the abnormal but yet touches 
the lives of some married people who are indi- 
vidually both normal and healthy, about which 
a few words need to be said. 
It not infrequently happens that two healthy 136 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
loving people, for no apparent reason, seem un- 
able to have a child. 
The old-fashioned view was that the fault lay 
with the woman, and the reproach of being a 
barren woman is one which has brought untold 
anguish to many hearts. It is now beginning 
to be recognized, however, that in a childless 
union, the “fault,” if fault it be, is as often 
the man’s as the woman’s, particularly where 
the husband is a brain worker in a city. 
Though it is natural that there should not be 
the same joy for the pair in a child which had 
not arisen from their own supreme fusion, 
nevertheless, the man who is generous and 
broad-minded might find much joy in a child 
of his wife’s, were the obtaining of this child 
not coupled with the yielding of her body to 
the embrace of another man, which is so gen- 
erally and naturally repugnant to a husband. 
Nevertheless, now that women have been suc- 
cessfully impregnated by means of injected 
semen, a new possibility has arisen for any in- 
dividual pair who are childless and who long 
for a little one.1 Where the injection is under- 
1This was done by the famous Dr. Hunter at the end of 
the eighteenth century, and since then various doctors have 
employed this method. An account of some cases is given by CHILDREN 
137 
taken by a woman doctor, the husband need 
have no feeling that his wife has been violated. 
And while it is not certain that this method 
would succeed in giving the child she longs for 
to the woman, yet there are sufficient records 
in the medical profession of successful artificial 
insemination for it to offer much hope to a pair 
who have been denied perfectly normal parent- 
hood either through the husband’s actual steril- 
ity or the lack of mutual adjustment in their 
organs, or from an ill-understood lack of chemi- 
cal affinity. 
While in such an event the husband would 
have no bodily part in the heritage of this child, 
yet in the creation of its spirit he could play a 
profound part, the potentialities of which ap- 
pear to be almost unrecognized by humanity. 
[I regret having to disillusion the reader on 
the subject of artificial impregnation. Many 
attempts at artificial impregnation of the hu- 
man female have been made, but the successes 
have been so few and far between, that the 
method is never likely to acquire a great vogue. 
For some centuries to come we will have to 
depend upon the old-fashioned natural meth- 
Heape in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1897; see also 
Marshall’s text book of “Physiology of Reproduction,” 1910. 138 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
od for the perpetuation of the human race. 
W. J. R.] 
The idea that the soul and character of the 
child can be in any degree influenced by the 
mental status of the mother during the months 
of its development as an embryo within her 
body, is apt to be greeted with pure skepticism 
—for it is difficult of proof, and repugnant to 
the male intellect, now accustomed to explain 
life in terms of chemistry. 
Yet all the wisest mothers whom I know vary 
only in the degree of their belief in this power 
of the mother. All are agreed in believing that 
the spiritual and mental condition and environ- 
ment of the mother does profoundly affect the 
character and the mental and spiritual powers 
of the child. 
An interesting fact which strengthens the 
woman’s point of view, is quoted (though not 
in this connection) by Marshall,2 who says: “It 
has been found that immunity from disease may 
be acquired by young animals being suckled by 
a female which had previously become immune, 
the antibody to the disease being absorbed in 
the ingested milk. ’ ’ This particular fact is ex- 
plainable in terms of chemistry: but it seems to 
*“The Physiology of Eeproduction, ’ ’ 1910, p. 566. CHILDREN 
139 
me more than rash for any one in these days of 
hormones from ductless glands, to deny the pos- 
sibility of mental states in the mother generat- 
ing “chemical messengers” which may impress 
permanent characters in the physiological re- 
actions of the developing child. Ellis says 
(“ Sex and Society ’ ’), “ The mother is the child’s 
supreme parent, and during the period from 
conception to birth the hygiene of the future 
man can only be affected by influences which 
work through her.” 
And Alfred Russel Wallace, the great natu- 
ralist, thought the transmission of mental in- 
fluence neither impossible nor even very improb- 
able.3 I am convinced that it takes place all the 
time, molding and influencing the hereditary 
factors. 
Hence I suggest that the husband who is de- 
prived of normal fatherhood may yet make the 
child of his wife’s body partly his own, if his 
thoughts are with her intensely, supportingly 
and joyously throughout the whole time of the 
unborn baby’s growth. If he reads to her, plays 
beautiful music or takes her to hear it, and gives 
her the very best of his thoughts and aspira- 
tions, mystical though the conclusion may seem, 
• “Nature,’’ 1893, August 24, pp, 389 and 390.  LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
140 
he does attain an actual measure of fatherhood. 
The converse, where the wife is really bar- 
ren and the husband capable of having children 
with another woman, is a much more difficult 
problem. Then the attainment of children by 
the man is impossible without the collaboration 
of another woman in a manner not recognized 
by our laws and customs. Even if this is done, 
it is clear that to introduce the child of another 
•woman into the home is demanding a much 
greater self-abnegation from the wife than is 
demanded from the husband in the situation wTe 
have just considered. 
Many people whose ideals are very noble are 
yet strangely incapable of adapting the material 
facts of life to the real fulfillment of their ideals. 
Thus there is a section of our community which 
insists that there should be no restriction what- 
ever of the number of children born to married 
people. They think any birth control immoral. 
They take their stand upon the statement that 
we have no right to destroy potential life. But 
if they would study a little human or animal 
physiology they would find that not only every 
celibate, but also every married man incessantly 
and unavoidably wastes myriads of germs which 
had the potentiality of fusion with an ovum, and CHILDREN 
141 
consequently could have produced a child had 
opportunity been given them. For the supposed 
sake of one or two of these myriad sperma- 
tozoa which must naturally and inevitably die, 
they encourage the production of babies in 
rapid succession, which are weakened by their 
proximity, while they might have been sturdy 
and healthy, had they been conceived further 
apart from each other. 
Such people, while awake to the claims of the 
unborn, nay even of the unconceived, are blind 
to the claims of the one who should be dearest 
of all to the husband, and for whose health and 
happiness he is responsible. A man swayed by 
such pseudo-religious ignorance will allow his 
wife to bear and bring forth an infant annually. 
Save where the woman is exceptional, each child 
following so rapidly on its predecessor, saps 
and divides the vital strength which is avail- 
able for the making of the offspring. This 
generally lowers the vitality of each succeed- 
ing child, and surely even if slowly, may mur- 
der the woman who bears them. 
Of course the effects of this strain upon the 
woman vary greatly according to her original 
health and vitality, the conditions of her sur- 
roundings and the intensity of the family’s 142 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
struggle for food. A half-starved mother try- 
ing to bring np children in the foul air of city 
slums, loses, as a rule, far more of her family 
than a comfortable and well-fed woman in the 
country. Nevertheless, conditions are not every- 
thing; under the best conditions the chances of 
death of the later children of a large family, 
which comes rapidly, are far greater than for 
the earlier children. 
Dr. Ploetz found that wThile the death rate of 
first born infants is about 220 per thousand, 
the death rate of the seventh born is about 330, 
and of the twelfth born is 597 per thousand. So 
that when “nature” has its way, and twelve 
children come to sap a woman’s vitality, so lit- 
tle strength has she that nearly 60 per cent, of 
these later ones die. What a waste of vitality! 
What a hideous orgy of agony for the mothers 
to produce in anguish death-doomed, suffering 
infants! 
Forel (“The Sexual Question”) says: “It 
seems almost incredible that in some countries 
medical men who are not ashamed to throw 
young men into the arms of prostitution, blush 
when mention is made of anti-conceptional 
methods. This false modesty, created by cus- 
tom and prejudice, waxes indignant at innocent CHILDREN 
143 
things while it encourages the greatest infa- 
mies.” 
It is important to observe that Holland, the 
country which takes most care that children 
shall be well and voluntarily conceived, has in- 
creased its survival-rate and has thereby not 
diminished but increased its population, and has 
the lowest infant mortality in Europe. While in 
America, where the outrageous “Comstock 
Laws” confuse wise scientific prevention with 
illegal abortion and label them both as “ob- 
scene,” thus preventing people from obtaining 
decent hygienic knowledge, horrible and crim- 
inal abortion is more frequent than in any other 
country. 
It should be realized that all the proper, medi- 
cal methods of preventing undesired pregnancy 
consists, not in destroying an already growing 
embryo, but in preventing the male semen from 
reaching the unfertilized egg cell. This may be 
done either by shutting the semen away from 
the opening of the womb, or by securing the 
death of all (instead of the natural death of all 
but one) of the two or three hundred million 
spermatozoa which enter the woman. Even 
when a child is allowed to grow in its mother, 
all these hundreds of millions of spermatozoa 144 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
are inevitably and naturally destroyed every 
time the man has an emission; and to add one 
more to these millions sacrificed by nature is 
surely no crime! To render inert the ejaculated 
spermatozoa which would otherwise die and de- 
compose naturally is a simple matter, now fa- 
miliar to every intelligent physician and lay- 
man. The knowledge is easily obtainable. 
To those who protest that wTe have no right to 
interfere with the course of nature, one must 
point out that the whole of civilization, every- 
thing which separates man from the animals, 
is an interference with what such people com- 
monly call “nature.’1 
Nothing in the cosmos can be against nature 
for it all forms part of the great processes of 
the universe. 
Actions differ, however, in their relative po- 
sitions in the scale of things. Only those ac- 
tions are worthy which lead the race onwards 
to a higher and fuller completion and the per- 
fecting of its powers, which steer the race into 
the main current of that stream of life and vi- 
tality which courses through us and impels us 
forward. 
It is the sacred duty of all who dare to hand 
on the awe-inspiring gift of life, to hand it on CHILDREN 
145 
in a vessel as fit and perfect as they can fashion, 
so that the body may be the strongest and most 
beautiful instrument possible in the service of 
the soul they summon to play its part in the 
mystery of material being. CHAPTER X 
SOCIETY 
“Love is fed not by what it takes, but by what it gives, and 
that excellent dual love of man and wife must be fed also by 
the love they give to others.”—Edward Carpenter. 
Man, even the commonplace modern man, is 
romantic. He craves consciously or uncon- 
sciously for the freedom, the beauty, and the 
adventure which his forefathers found in their 
virgin forests. This craving, transmuted, 
changed out of recognition by civilized life and 
modern conditions, is yet a factor not to be 
ignored in the relationship of the sexes. 
The “bonds of matrimony” so often referred 
to with ribald laughter, touch, and perhaps se- 
cretly gall, even the most romantic and devoted 
husband. If to the sincere and friendly ques- 
tion, “What is most difficult in married life 
for the man?” one should get a sincere answer 
—that answer would be summed up in the 
words: ‘1 Perpetual propinquity.9 9 
Of this, the wife, particularly if she be really 
146 SOCIETY 
147 
in love, is seldom fully aware. If her husband 
is her true lover, his tenderness and real devo- 
tion will give him the wit to conceal it. But 
though by concealment he may preserve the un- 
ruffled surface of their happiness, yet the long- 
ing to be roving is not completely extinguished. 
In the true lover this unspoken and unconscious 
longing is perhaps less a desire to set out upon 
a fresh journey, than a longing to experience 
again the exquisite joy of the return: to re-live 
the magic charm of the approach to the spot in 
which the loved one is living her life, into the 
sacred separateness of which the lover breaks 
and, like the Prince by his kiss, to stir her to 
fresh activity. 
As will be realized by those who have under- 
stood the preceding chapters, each coming to- 
gether of man and wife, even if they have been 
mated for many years, should be a fresh adven- 
ture; each winning should necessitate a fresh 
wooing. 
Yet what a man often finds so hard, is to come 
to that wooing with full ardor and with that 
complete sense of romance which alone can ren- 
der it utterly delightful, if the woman he is to 
woo has been in a too uninterrupted and pro- 
saic relation with him in the meantime.  LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
148 
Most men, of course, have their businesses 
apart from their homes, but in the home lives 
of the great mass of middle-class people, the 
Victorian tradition still too largely preponder- 
ates, and the mated pair bore each other to 
death during the daily routine. 
To a very thoughtful couple of my acquaint- 
ance, the sense of romantic joy in one another 
was so precious that they endeavored to per- 
petuate it by living in different houses. 
Such a measure, however, is not likely to suit 
many people, particularly where there are chil- 
dren. Yet even without bodily separation (which 
must always entail expense) or any measure of 
freedom not at every one’s command, much can 
be done to retain that sense of spiritual freedom 
in which alone the full joy of loving union can 
be experienced. 
But even intellectual and spiritual freedom is 
often rendered impossible in present-day mar- 
riage. 
The beautiful desire for ideal unity which is 
so strong in most hearts, is perhaps the original 
cause of one of the most deadening features in 
many marriages. In the endeavor to attain the 
ideal unity, one partner consciously or uncon- 
sciously imposes his or her will and opinions SOCIETY 
149 
upon the other partner, and then upon the chil- 
dren as they grow up. 
The typical self-opinionated male which this 
course develops, while a subject for laughter 
in plays and novels, a laughter which hastens 
his extermination, is yet by no means extinct. 
In his less exaggerated form such a man may 
often be an idealist, but he is essentially an 
idealist of narrow vision. The peace, the unity, 
for which he craves is superficially attained; but 
it takes acuter eyes than his to see that it is 
attained not by harmonious intermingling, but 
by super-position and destruction. 
I have known a romantic man of this type, 
apparently unaware that he was encroaching 
upon his wife’s personality, who yet endeavored 
not only to choose her books and her friends 
for her, but “prohibited” her from buying the 
daily newspaper to which she had been accus- 
tomed for years before her marriage, saying 
that one newspaper was enough for them both, 
and blandly ignoring the fact that he took it 
with him out of the house before she had an 
opportunity of reading it. This man posed to 
himself more successfully than to others, not 
only as a romantic man, but as a model hus- 
band; and he reproached his wife for jeopardiz- 150 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
ing their perfect unity whenever she accepted 
an invitation in which he was not included. 
On the other hand, in homes where the avowed 
desire is for the modern freedom of intellectual 
life for both partners, there is very frequently 
a bickering, a sense of disharmony and unrest 
that dispels the peace and the air of restful se- 
curity which is an essential feature of a true 
home. 
It is one of the most difficult things in the 
world for two people of different opinions to re- 
tain their own opinions without each endeavor- 
ing to convert or coerce the other, and at the 
same time to feel the same tender trust in the 
judgment of the other that each would have felt 
had they agreed. 
It takes a generous and beautiful heart to see 
beauty and dignity in the attitude of a mate who 
is looking at the other side of a vital question. 
But the very fact that it does take a beautiful 
and generous heart to do this thing proves it 
well worth the doing. 
If the easier way is chosen and the two mu- 
tually conceal their views when they differ, or 
the stronger partner coerces the weaker into 
hiding those traits which give personality to an 
individual, the result is an impoverishing of SOCIETY 
151 
both, and through that very fact, an impover- 
ishment, a lowering of the love which both 
sought to serve. 
In marriage each one dreams that he will find 
the Understander—the one from whom he may 
set out into the world in search of treasures of 
knowledge and experience, and before whom the 
spoils may be exhibited without thought of ri- 
valry, and with the certainty of glad apprisal. 
Treasures, dear to our own hearts but of no 
value to others, should here find appreciation, 
and here the tender super-sensitive germ of an 
idea may be watered and tended till its ripe 
beauty is ready to burst upon the world. 
As marriage is at present, such tenderness 
and such stimulating appreciation is much more 
likely to come from the woman to the man and 
his work than from the man to the woman. 
For too long have men been accustomed to look 
upon woman’s views, and in particular on her 
intellectual opinions, as being something de- 
manding at the most a bland humoring beneath 
the kindest of smiles. 
Even from the noblest man, the woman of 
sensitive personality to-day feels an undercur- 
rent as of surprised congratulation when she 
has anything to say worth his serious attention 152 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
outside that department of life supposed to be- 
long to her “sphere.” Thus man robs his 
wedded self of a greatness which the dual unity 
might reach. 
But in marriage the mutual freedom and re- 
spect for opinions, vitally important though 
they be, are not sufficient for the full develop- 
ment of character. Life demands ever widening 
interests. Owing partly to the differentiation 
of many types of individuals due to the special- 
ization of civilization, and partly to the trans- 
mutation of liis old vagrant instinct, man in- 
creasingly desires to touch and to realize the 
lives of his fellows. In the lives of others our 
hearts and understandings may find perpetual 
adventures into the new and strange. 
Individual human beings, even the noblest 
and most complex yet evolved, have but a share 
of the innumerable faculties of the race. Hence 
even in a supremely happy marriage, which 
touches, as does the mystic in his raptures, a 
realization of the whole universe, there cannot 
lie the whole of life’s experience. Outside the 
actual lives of the pair there must always be 
many types of thought and many potentialities 
which can only be realized in the lives of other 
people. SOCIETY 
153 
In the complete human relation friends of all 
grades are needed, as well as a mate. Marriage, 
however, in its present form is too often made 
to curtail the enjoyment of intimate friend- 
ships. The reason for this is partly the social 
etiquette, which, though discarded in the high- 
est levels of society, still lingers in many cir- 
cles, of inviting the husband and the wife to- 
gether upon all social occasions. It is true 
that they are separated at the dinner table, but 
they are always within the possibility of ear- 
shot of each other, which very often deadens 
their potentialities for being entertaining. The 
mere fact of being overheard repeating some- 
thing one may have already said elsewhere, is 
sufficient to prevent some people from telling 
their best stories, or from expressing their real 
views about important matters. 
And, a still more serious barrier to joy, so 
primitive, so little evolved are we even yet, 
there is in most human beings a strong streak 
of sex-jealousy. For either mate to be allowed 
to go out uncriticized into the world, is to de- 
mand, if not more than the other is willing to 
give, at least a measure of trust which by its 
rarity appears now-a-days as something con- 
spicuously fine. 154 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
Jealousy, which is one of the most frequent 
shadows cast by the light of love, is very apt to 
sow a distrust in one which makes a normal 
life for the other partner impossible. 
It is hard to say in which sex the feeling is 
more strongly developed. It takes special 
forms under different circumstances, and if a 
nature is predisposed towards it, it is one of the 
most difficult characteristics to eradicate. 
Custom, and generations of traditions, seem 
to have imprinted on our race the false idea that 
marital fidelity is to be strengthened by coercive 
bonds. We are slowly growing out of this, and 
now-a-days in most books giving advice to 
young wives there is a section telling them that 
a man should be allowed his men friends after 
marriage. 
But this is not enough. There should be com- 
plete and unquestioning trust on both sides. 
The man and the woman should each be free to 
go, unchallenged even in thought, on solitary 
excursions, or on visits, week-ends or walking 
tours, without the possibility of a breath of jeal- 
ousy or suspicion springing up in the heart of 
the other. 
It is true that many natures are not yet ready 
for such trust, and might abuse such freedom. SOCIETY 
155 
But the baser natures will always find a method 
of gratifying their desires, and are not likely to 
err more in trusted freedom than they would 
inevitably have done through secret intrigues 
if held in jealous bondage. 
And it is only in the fresh unsullied air of 
such freedom that the fullest and most perfect 
love can develop. In the marriage relation it 
is supremely true that only by loosening the 
bonds can one bind two hearts indissolubly to- 
gether. 
When they are sometimes physically apart 
married lovers attain the closest spiritual union. 
For with sensitive spirits—and they are the 
only ones who know the highest pinnacles of 
love—periods of separation and solitude can be 
revivifying and re-creative. 
So great is the human soul that some of its 
beauty is hidden by nearness: it needs distance 
between it and the beholder to be perceived in 
its true perspective. 
To the realization of the beauty and the enjoy- 
ment of solitude, woman in general tends to be 
less open than man. This, perhaps, is due to 
the innumerable generations during which the 
claims of her children and of domestic life have 
robbed her of nature’s healing gift. 156 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
Although it is merely incidental to the drama* 
yet to me the most poignant thing in Synge’s 
beautiful play Deirdre is that she could feel 
inevitable tragedy when the first thought of 
something apart from herself crosses her 
lover’s mind. Deirdre and her lover had been 
together for seven years in an unbroken and 
idyllic intimacy, and she feels that all is fin- 
ished, and that her doom, the knell of their joy, 
had struck, when for the first time she perceived 
in him a half-formed thought of an occupation 
apart from her. 
This ancient weakness of our sex must be 
conquered, and is being conquered by the mod- 
ern woman. 
While modern marriage is tending to give 
ever more and more freedom to each of the part- 
ners, there is at the same time a unity of work 
and interest growing up which brings them to- 
gether on a higher plane than the purely do- 
mestic one which was so confining to the women 
and so dull to the men. Every year one sees a 
widening of the independence and the range of 
the pursuits of women: but still, far too often, 
marriage puts an end to woman’s intellectual 
life. Marriage can never reach its full stature 
until women possess as much intellectual free- SOCIETY 
157 
dom and freedom of opportunity within it as 
do their partners. 
That at present the majority of women 
neither desire freedom for creative work, nor 
would know how to use it, is only a sign that we 
are still living in the shadow of the coercive 
and dwarfing influences of the past. 
In an interesting article on woman’s intellec- 
tual work, W. J. Thomas (“Sex and Society”) 
says: “The American woman, with the enjoy- 
ment of greater liberty has made an approach 
toward the standards of professional scholar- 
ship, and some individuals stand at the very 
top in their university studies and examina- 
tions. The trouble with these cases is that they 
are either swept away and engulfed by the mod- 
ern system of marriage, or find themselves ex- 
cluded in some intangible way from association 
with men in the fullest sense, and no career is 
open to their talents.” 
He sees clearly that this is but a passing 
phase in the development of our society, and he 
advocates a wider scope for the play of married 
women’s powers. “The practice of an occupa- 
tional activity of her own choosing, and a gen- 
erous attitude towards this on the part of the 158 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
man, would contribute to relieve the strain and 
make marriage more frequently successful.” 
When woman naturally develops the powers 
latent within her, man will find at his side not 
only a mate, free and strong, but a desirable 
friend and an intellectual comrade. 
The desire for freedom, both for physical and 
mental exploration and for experiences outside 
the sacred enclosure of the home, may at first 
sight appear to be conflicting and entirely in- 
compatible with the ideal of closer and more 
perfect unity between the married pair. But 
this conflict is only apparent, though it is true 
that most writers have failed to realize this. 
Consequently, in some sections of the writing 
and teaching of the “advanced” schools, there 
are claims only for increased freedom—a free- 
dom to wander at will—a freedom in wdiich the 
wanderer does not return to his fixed center. 
On the other hand there are those who real- 
ize principally the beauty of married unity, and, 
concentrating on the demand for the unity and 
extremest chastity on the part of the married 
pair, are very apt to ignore the enriching flow 
of a wide life’s experiences. They try to dam 
up the fertilizing tide of life, and thus, though 
they are unconscious of what they are doing* SOCIETY 
159 
they tend to reduce the richness and beauty of 
marriage. 
It is for the young people of the new genera- 
tion to realize that the two currents of longing 
which spring up within them—the longing for 
a full life-experience, and the longing for a 
close union with a life-long mate—are not in- 
compatible but are actually both essential parts 
of the more perfect and fuller beauty of the fu- 
ture that already seeks to find its expression 
in their lives. 
Ellen Key (“Love and Marriage”) seems to 
fear the widening of the married woman’s life, 
and she writes as though the aspiration to do 
professional and intellectual work of a high or- 
der must dwarf and sterilize the mother in the 
married woman. 
She writes of a more northerly people, the 
Scandinavians, and it may be true of her coun- 
try-women, I do not know. But it is not essen- 
tially and universally true. I am writing of 
the English-speaking races of to-day, and 
though we also have among us that dwarfed 
and sterilized type of woman, she forms in our 
community a dwindling minority. The major- 
ity of our best women enter marriage and 
motherhood, or else long for a marriage more 160 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
beautiful than the warped mockery of it that 
is offered them. 
As Mrs. Gilman says (“Women and Eco- 
nomics”) : 
“In the primal physical functions of maternity 
the human female cannot show that her supposed 
specialization to these uses has improved her fulfil- 
ment of them, rather the opposite. The more freely 
the human mother mingles in the natural industries of 
a human creature, as in the case of the savage woman, 
the peasant woman, the working woman everywhere 
who is not overworked, the more rightly she fulfills 
these functions. The more absolutely the woman is 
segregated to sex-functions only, cut off from all 
economic use and made wholly dependent on the sex- 
relation as means of a livelihood, the more patho- 
logical does her motherhood become. The over-de- 
velopment of sex caused by her economic dependence 
on the male reacts unfavorably on her essential duties. 
She is too female for the perfect motherhood!” 
The majority of our young women, I am con- 
vinced, have in them the potentiality of a full1 
and perfected love. So, too, have the majority 
of our young men. For the best type of young 
man to-day is tired of polygamy, he has seen 
enough in his father’s and his friends’ lives of 
the weariness of the sinister, secret polygamy, SOCIETY 
161 
that hides itself and rots the race under the pro- 
tecting cloak of the supposed monogamy of our 
social system. 
But as things are at present in England and 
in America, the young man who marries, how- 
ever much he may be in love, is generally too 
ignorant (as has been indicated in the preced- 
ing chapters) to give his wife real physical de- 
light. Then, sooner or later, comes the sequence 
of disappointments which culminate in the long- 
ing for a fresh adventure. 
As one young husband said to me: “A de- 
cent man can’t go on having unions with his 
wife when she obviously does not enjoy them,” 
and so he is forced to “go elsewhere.” “And 
they call us polygamists! We are not polyg- 
amists. But marriage is a rotten failure,” was 
his verdict. 
No. They are not polygamists, the finest 
young men of the present and of the future. 
Most men to-day are not in their heart of hearts 
polygamists, in spite of all the outward signs 
to the contrary; in spite of the fact that so few 
of them have remained faithful to one woman. 
But they are ignorant of the sex-laws and tra- 
ditions, that sex-knowledge which was the herit- 
age of much less civilized tribes, and so they 162 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
have trampled and crushed out the very thing 
for the growth of which their hearts are ach- 
ing. 
Hence secretly (for in a marriage that is at 
least superficially happy the man seldom does 
this openly) the man begins to crave for an- 
other type of society and he “goes elsewhere.” 
Not, it is true, to find, or even in the hope of 
finding, what he would get from a perfect mar- 
riage ; but often to satisfy in some measure that 
yearning for fresh experience, for romance, and 
for that sense of fusion with another is the ro- 
mantic experience which, even if it is only a 
delusion of the senses, is yet one of the most 
precious things life has to offer. 
It is hard, indeed, in many cases it seems im- 
possible, for a good woman to understand what 
it is that draws her husband from her. Re- 
stricted by habit and convention in the exercise 
of all her faculties, she is unaware of the ever 
narrowing range of her interest and her pow- 
ers of conversation. The home life tends to be- 
come that of a fenced pond, instead of a great 
ocean with innumerable currents. From the re- 
stricted and fenced, man’s instinct is ever to 
escape. Man’s opportunities for exploration in 
the cities are few, and the loose woman is one SOCIETY 
163 
of the most obvious doors of escape into new 
experiences. 
Women feel a so righteous and instinctive 
horror of prostitution, and, regarding it, they 
experience an indignation so intense that they 
do not seek to understand the man’s attitude. 
The prostitute, however, sometimes supplies 
an element which is not purely physical, and 
which is often lacking in the wife’s relation with 
her husband, an element of charm and mutual 
gayety in pleasure. 
If good women realized this, while they would 
judge and endeavor to eliminate prostitution 
no less strenuously, they might be in a better 
position to begin their efforts to free men from 
the hold that the social evil has upon them. 
It is perhaps impossible to find the begin- 
ning of a vicious circle, but the first step out 
of it must be the realization that one is within 
it, and the realization of some, at any rate, of 
its component parts. 
Man, through prudery, through the custom of 
ignoring the woman’s side of marriage and con- 
sidering his own whim as the marriage law, 
has largely lost the art of stirring a chaste 
partner to physical love. He therefore deprives 
her of a glamour, the loss of which he deplores, 164 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
for he feels a lack not only of romance and 
beauty, hut of something higher which is mys- 
tically given as the result of the complete union. 
He blames his wife’s “coldness” instead of his 
own want of art. Then he seeks elsewhere for 
the things she could have given him had he 
known how to win them. And she, knowing that 
the shrine has been desecrated, is filled with 
righteous indignation, though generally as blind 
as he is to the true cause of what has occurred. 
Manifold and far-reaching, influencing the 
whole structure of society not only in this coun- 
try, but in every country and at every time, 
have been the influences which have grown up 
from the root-fallacy in the marriage relation. 
Then there is another cause for the dulling 
of a wife ’s bright charm. It is indeed a serious 
matter, as Jean Finot says, that, “under pres- 
ent conditions, the mistress keeps certain liber- 
ties which are denied to married women.” 
The past and its history have been studied 
by many, and we may leave it. What concerns 
the present generation of young married peo- 
ple, is to-day and the future. The future is full 
of hope. Already one sees beginning to grow 
up a new relationship between the units com- 
posing society. SOCIETY 
165 
In the noblest society love will hold sway. 
The love of mates will always be the supremest 
life experience, hut it will no longer he an ex- 
perience exclusive and warped. 
The love of friends and children, of com- 
rades and fellow-workers, will but serve to de- 
velop every power of the two who are mates. 
By mingling the greatness of their individual 
stature they can achieve together something 
that, had both or either been dwarfed and puny 
individuals, would have remained for ever un- 
attainable. 
The whole trend of the evolution of human 
society has been toward an increased coherence 
of all its parts, until at the present time it is 
already almost possible to say that the commu- 
nity has an actual life on a plane above that 
of all the individuals composing it: that the 
community in fact is a superentity. It is 
through the community of human beings, and 
not in our individual lives, that we reach an 
ultimate permanence upon this globe. 
When our relation to the community is fully 
realized, it will be seen that the health, the hap- 
piness, and the consequent powers of every in- 
dividual, concern not only his own life, but also 166 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
affect the whole community of which he is a 
member. 
The happiness of a perfect marriage, which 
enhances the joy of the private life, renders 
one not only capable of adding to the stream of 
the life-blood of the community in children, but 
by marriage one is also rendered a fitter and 
more perfect instrument for one’s own particu- 
lar work, in the tempering and finishing of 
which society plays a part, and the results of 
which should be shared by society as a whole. 
Thus it is the concern of the whole commu- 
nity that marriage should be as perfect, and 
hence as joyous, as possible; so that the pow- 
ers which should be set free and created for 
the purpose of the whole community should not 
be frittered away in the useless longing and 
disappointment engendered by ignorance, nar- 
row restrictions, and low ideals. 
In the world the happily mated pair should 
be like a great and beautiful light; a light not 
hid under a bushel, but one whose beams shine 
through the lives of all around them. CHAPTER XI 
THE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING 
“Lot knowledge grow from more to more, but more of 
reverence in us dwell.”—Tennyson. 
We are surrounded in this world by processes 
and transmutations so amazing that were they 
not taking place around us hourly they would 
be scouted as impossible imaginings. 
A mind must be dull and essentially lacking 
in imagination which can learn without interest 
or amazement for the first time that the air we 
breathe, apparently so uniform in its invisible 
unity, is in reality composed of two principal, 
and several other, gases. The two gases, how- 
ever, are but mixed as wine may be with water, 
and each gas by itself is a colorless air, visually 
like that mixture of the two which we call the 
atmosphere. 
Much greater is the miracle of the composi- 
tion of water. It is made of only two gases, one 
of them a component of the air we breathe, and 
167 168 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
the other similarly invisible and odorless, hut 
far lighter. These two invisible gases when 
linked in a proportion proper to their natures, 
fuse and are no longer ethereal and invisible, 
but precipitate in a new substance, water. 
The waves of the sea with their thundering 
power, the sparkling tides of the river buoy- 
ing the ships, are but the transmuted resultant 
of the union of two invisible gases. And this, 
in its simplest terms, is a parable of the in- 
finitely complex and amazing transmutations of 
love. 
Ellis expresses the strange mystery of one of 
the physical sides of love when he says: 
“What has always baffled men in the contemplation 
of sexual love is the seeming inadequacy of its cause, 
the immense discrepancy between the necessarily cir- 
cumscribed regions of mucous membrane which is the 
final goal of such love and the sea of world-embrac- 
ing emotions to which it seems the door, so that, as 
Remy de Gourmont has said, ‘ the mucous membranes, 
by an ineffable mystery, enclose in their obscure folds 
all the riches of the infinite.’ It is a mystery before 
which the thinker and the artist are alike overcome. ’ ’ 
To me, however, the recent discoveries of 
physiology seem to afford a key which may un- THE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING 
169 
lock a chamber of the mystery and admit ns to 
one of the halls of the palace of truth. The 
hormones the internal secretions of the so-called 
ductless glands in each individual body pour 
from one organ and affect another, and thus 
influence the whole character of the individual’s 
life processes. The visible secretions and the 
most subtle essences which pass during union 
between man and woman, affect the lives of each 
and are essentially vital to each other. As I 
see them, the man and the woman are each or- 
gans, parts, of the other. And in the strictest 
scientific, as well as in a mystical, sense they 
together are a single unit, an individual en- 
tity. There is a physiological as well as a 
spiritual truth in the words, “they twain shall 
be one flesh.” 
In love it is not only that the yearning of the 
bonds of affinity to be satisfied is met by the 
linking with another, but that out of this union 
there grows a new and unprecedented creation. 
In this I am not speaking of the bodily child 
which springs from the love of its parents, but 
of the superphysical entity created by the per- 
fect union in love of man and woman. To- 
gether, united by the love bonds which hold 
them, they are a new and wondrous thing sur- 170 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
passing, and different from, the arithmetical 
sum of them both when separate. 
So seldom has the perfection of this new 
creation been experienced, that we are still far 
short even of imagining its full potentialities, 
but that it must have mighty powers we dimly 
realize. 
Youths and maidens stirred by the attraction 
of love, feel hauntingly and inarticulately that 
there is before them an immense and beautiful 
experience: feel as though in union with the be- 
loved there will be added powers of every sort 
which have no measure in terms of the ordi- 
nary unmated life. 
These prophetic dreams, if they are not true 
of each individual life, are yet true of the race 
as a whole. For in the dreams of youth to-day 
is a foreshadowing of the reality of the future. 
So accustomed have we recently become to 
accept one aspect of organic evolution, that we 
tend to see in youth only a recapitulation of 
our race’s history. The well-worn phrase ‘ ‘ On- 
togeny repeats Phytogeny” has helped to con- 
centrate our attention on the fact that the young 
in their development, in ourselves as in the ani- 
mals, go through many phases which resemble THE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING 
171 
the stages through which the whole race must 
have passed in the course of its evolution. 
While this is true, there is another character- 
istic of youth: It is prophetic! 
The dreams of youth, which each young heart 
expects to see fulfilled in its own life, seem so 
often to fade unfulfilled. . . . But that is be- 
cause the wonderful powers of youth are not 
supplied with the necessary tool—knowledge. 
And so potentialities, which could have worked 
miracles are allowed to atrophy and die. 
But as humanity orients itself more truly, 
more and more will the knowledge and experi- 
ence of the whole race be placed at the disposal 
of all youth on its entry into life. 
Then that glorious upspringing of the racial 
ideal, which finds its expression in each un- 
spoiled generation of youth, will at last meet 
with a store of knowledge sufficient for its 
needs, and will find ready as a tool to its hand 
the accumulated and sifted wisdom of the race. 
Then youth will be spared the blunders and 
the pain and the unconscious self-destruction 
that to-day leaves scarcely any one untouched. 
In my own life, comparatively short and 
therefore lacking in experience though it be, I 
have known, both personally and vicariously, 172 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
so much anguish that might have been pre- 
vented by timely knowledge. This impels me 
not to wait till my experience and researches 
are complete, and my life and vital interests 
are fading, but to hand on at once those glean- 
ings of wisdom I have already accumulated 
which may help the race to understand itself. 
Hence I conclude this little book, for, though 
incomplete, it contains some of the vital things 
youth should be told. 
In all life activities, house-building, hunting 
or any other, where intellectual and oral tra- 
dition comes in, as it does with the human race, 
“instinct” tends to die out. Thus the human 
mother is far less able to manage her baby with- 
out instruction, than is a cat her kittens; al- 
though the human mother at her best, has, in 
comparison with the cat, an infinitude of duties 
toward, and influences over, her child. 
A similar truth holds in relation to marriage. 
The century-long following of various “civil- 
ized ’ ’ customs has not only deprived our young 
people of most of the instinctive knowledge they 
might have possessed, but has given rise to in- 
numerable false and polluting customs. 
Though many write on the art of managing 
children, few have anything to say about the art THE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING 
173 
of marriage, save those who have some dogma, 
often theological or subversive of natural law, 
to proclaim. 
Any fundamental truth regarding marriage is 
rendered immeasurably difficult to ascertain be- 
cause of the immense ranges of variety in hu- 
man beings, even of the same race, many of 
which result from the artificial conditions and 
the unnatural stimuli so prevalent in what we 
call civilization. To attempt anything like a 
serious study of marriage in all its varieties 
would be a monumental work. Those who have 
even partially undertaken it have tended to be- 
come entangled in a maze of abnormalities, so 
that the needs of the normal, healthy, romantic 
person have been overlooked. 
Each pair, therefore, has tended to repeat the 
blunders from which it might have been saved, 
and to stumble blindly in a maze of difficulties 
which are not the essential heritage of human- 
ity, but are due to the unreasoning folly of our 
present customs. 
I have written this book for those who enter 
marriage normally and healthily, and with op- 
timism and hope. 
If they learn its lessons they may be saved 
from some of the pitfalls in which thousands 174 
LOVE IN MARRIAGE 
have wrecked their happiness, but they must 
not think that they will thereby easily attain 
the perfection of marriage. There are a myriad 
subtleties in the adjustment of any two indi- 
viduals. 
Each pair must, using the tenderest and most 
delicate touches, sound and test each other, 
learning their way about the intricacies of each 
other’s hearts. 
Sometimes, with all the knowledge and the 
best will in the world, two who have married 
find that they cannot fuse their lives; of this 
tragedy I have not here anything to say; but 
ordinary unhappiness would be less frequent 
than it is were the tenderness of knowledge ap- 
plied to the problem of mutual adjustment from 
the first day of marriage. 
All the deepest and highest forces within us 
impel us to evolve an ever nobler and tenderer 
form of life long monogamy as our social ideal. 
While the thoughtful and tender-hearted must 
seek, with ever greater understanding, to ease 
and comfort those who miss this joyful natural 
development, reformers in their zeal for side- 
issues must not forget the main growth of the 
stock. The beautiful sense for love in the hearts 
of the young should be encouraged, and they THE GLORIOUS UNFOLDING 
175 
should have access to the knowledge of how to 
cultivate it, instead of being diverted by the 
clamor for “freedom” to destroy it. 
Disillusioned middle age is apt to look upon 
the material side of the marriage relation, to see 
its solid surface in the cold, dull light of every- 
day experience; while youth irradiated by the 
glow of its dreams is unaware how its aerial 
and celestial phantasies are broken and shat- 
tered when unsuspectingly brought up against 
the hard facts of physical reality. 
The transmutation of material facts by celes- 
tial phantasies is to some extent within the 
power of humanity, even the imperfect human- 
ity of to-day. 
When knowledge and love go together to the 
making of each marriage, the joy of that new 
unit, the Pair, will reach from the physical foun- 
dation of its united body to the heavens where 
its head is crowned with stars. NOTES. 
Assuming now that the two are in the elosest mental 
and spiritual as well as sensory harmony: in what 
position should the act be consummated? Men and 
women, looking into each other’s eyes, kissing tenderly 
on the mouth, with their arms round each other, meet 
face to face. And that position is symbolic of the 
coming together of the two who meet together gladly. 
It is usual in civilized countries for the man to lie 
above the woman as she reclines on her back. Indeed 
a curious idea seems to exist that it is “immoral” or 
“humiliating” for the man if the position is reversed. 
Yet Ovid recommends it to little women, and where 
the woman is muscularly delicate and easily crushed 
there is no doubt that it is a position much more likely 
to give her pleasure. To make it quite satisfactory to 
the man, the woman must be tender and supple and 
skilled in the charm and movements of love-play. 
When this is so there may be an exquisite grace in 
the event, as though there had entered into it the 
poetry and beauty of the picture of the sleeping 
Endymion over whom the floating goddess Diana 
stooped. 
It seems incredible that to-day educated men should 
177 178 
NOTES 
be found who—apparently on theological grounds— 
refuse to countenance this position. Yet one wife told 
me that she was crushed and nearly suffocated by 
her husband so that it took her hours to recover after 
each union, but that “on principle” he refused to 
attempt any other position than the one he chose to 
consider normal. 
It is perhaps not generally realized how great are 
the variations of size, shape and position of all the sex 
parts of the body in different individuals, yet they 
differ more even than the size and characters of all 
the features of the face and hands. It happens there- 
fore that the position which suits most people is un- 
satisfactory for others. Some, for instance, can only 
enjoy union when both are lying on their sides. 
Though medically this is generally considered un- 
favorable or prohibitive for conception, yet I know 
women who have had several children and who always 
used this position. In this matter every couple should 
find out for themselves which of the many possible 
positions best suits them both. 
I invite letters from those who can confirm, qualify 
or correct my views from their own experience. To 
obtain scientific knowledge the largest possible num- 
ber of individual cases must be studied. 
While I believe that the charts I give of the Law of 
Periodicity of recurrence of desire truly represent 
the fundamental rhythm of average healthy women, NOTES 
179 
it must be remembered that my theory is new, and 
every well-authenticated case for or against it will be 
valuable. All communications will be treated with 
the strictest confidence. 
M. C. Stopes. The following pages 
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