This brings me to the last question I want to consider. Why does the desire of the wife so often cease towards her husband? It is a difficult question to answer. One reason has been given already in the false attitude of the woman, which in so many cases makes her ashamed of expressing openly the passion that she feels. Yet there is, I think, another and much deeper part of the truth that is fairly clear. Each man is able to enforce his sexual desire upon his wife at a time when she feels no desire, whereas she cannot gain her desire unless he gain his. We may perhaps trace back to this cause the feeling of disharmony and waning of desire which injures the woman’s power to love. Of course, this disharmony is not always conscious even to herself, and the man is quite unaware of the evil. But his acceptance of the woman’s subordination, however gladly given, does exhaust the passion in her.
This difference in the power for sexual sacrifice between the two sexes is, I have frequently thought, one of the gravest causes of our misery. It will take very long to overcome it. Only as we advance in refinement and knowledge of love can this antagonism in the sex act lessen, as the woman gains in frankness and the man comes to know how to arouse and keep aflame her desire.
And there is here a question I would put to those husbands who are suffering to-day from the sexual coldness of their wives. I would ask them: Have they taken sufficient trouble to understand, both on the physical and psychical side, the sexual nature of woman, which is much more complex and difficult than their own? The art of love is not understood by Western people. If we paid more attention to this subject marriage would be freed from the greatest cause that brings it to disaster. Greater openness and sexual confidence between the husband and the wife is the first necessary step. But we shall never have this until we have rooted out of our moral conscience the idea of “the body as the prison of the soul.” I have often asked myself if this misconception of love is not the real cause of all sex trouble.
And the remedy? Yes, that is the difficult matter. We cannot alter these evils by any cut-and-dried plan. The expression of sex is a question of refinement, and its regeneration must begin with a movement towards consciousness.