Married Love | Page 2

simple statements are based on a
very large number of first hand observations, on confidences 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 ordinary 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 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 unhappy 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 creatures 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

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
mysteries 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 knowledge gained at such a price should be placed at the
service of humanity.
In this book, average, healthy, mating creatures who come within the
limits of what may 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.

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 reason 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 functions; neither man nor woman singly
can create another human being. This fact, which is expressed in our
outward divergences 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 oneself which such union brings.
In all young people, unless they have inherited depraved or diseased
tendencies, the old desire of our race springs up afresh in its pristine
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