Married Love | Page 5

there is no firm foundation
beneath 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 conceivable 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 knowledge so abysmal and so universal that its mists and
shadowy darkness have affected even the few who lead us, and who are
prosecuting research in these subjects. And the two young people begin
to suffer from fundamental divergences, before perhaps they realize
that such 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 exceptions, 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, happy, but who yet, unawares, reveal the secret
disappointment which clouds their inward peace.
Leaving out of account "femmes incomprises" and all the innumerable
cases of neurotic, 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 confided to me the secrets of
their lives; and of all the innumerable cases in which the circumstances
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 partner, to be perfectly happy marriages, are secret
tragedies to the more sensitive of the pair.
Where the bride is, as are most of our educated 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. Unconscious of the nature, and even perhaps of the existence
of his fault, he is bewildered and pained by her inarticulate pain. It is
my experience, 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.
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 assume have read, or can read, other
books written 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 marriage 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-meaning, optimistic young

couples, to enlarge upon the obvious dangers of drunkenness,
self-indulgence, 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 nature, 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