Married Love | Page 9

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 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 anæmic artificial days it often happens that the man's
desire is a surface need, quickly satisfied, colorless, and lacking beauty,
and that he has no knowledge of the rich complexities of love-making
which an initiate of love's mysteries enjoys. To such a man his wife
may indeed 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, urging 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 charming 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 nothing but silence,
self-suppression, and their inevitable sequence of self-scorn, followed
by resentment towards the man who places her in such a position while
talking of his "love."
So little of the elements of the Art of Love do many men know that the
case of Mrs. G. is 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 married as a very innocent
girl, but often vaguely felt a sense of something lacking in her
husband'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
unconscious 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 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 satisfactory union. In this way he inhibited her natural
desire, and as he never did anything to stir it, she never had any
physical pleasure in their relation. Such prudish or careless husbands,
content with their own satisfaction, little know the pent-up aching, or
even resentment, 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. When she discovers the true nature 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,