More unions are wrecked by underindulgence due to fear, ignorance of the mates or inhibitions on the part of one or both, than to indulgence of the normal kind.
Anything which prevents or discourages the normal exchange of sexual caresses between those legally entitled to each others enjoyment is pernicious, antisocial and antibiological for, as Grace Potter writes:
"Mating has to do with other creation than that of new human beings. It has to do with every kind of creation--a new state, a poem, a picture, a great bridge, a happier world. Mating is concerned with repeopling the world but also with regeneration of the individual, opening his capacities to growth. Who shall say that the one is not as important as the other? If the second were not as important as the first there would have been hardly any advance in human culture. Of all the errors incident to the development of human beings, in their struggle to attain a consciousness that makes them more than animals, none has had wider ill-effects than our misuse of love.
"There are two equally unfortunate attitudes toward love which perhaps grow out of each other. The one is the puritan attitude and the other is the vulgar one. The puritan attitude is that sex impulses are somehow vile and so, altho they give pleasure, must be denied. The vulgar attitude takes it for granted that sex impulses are vile but as they are pleasant are to be accepted. The one tends to deny physical values to love. This is suppression. The other tends to deny tender values to love. That is suppression also. They have neither one known love. And finally the puritan becomes incapable of tenderness and the vulgar becomes equally incapable of physical expression. It is not a beautiful picture.
"The healthy attitude is this: The sex impulse is not degrading any more than any other impulse is. It is a force as gravity is a force. Those human beings achieve beauty and harmony who correlate sexual impulses harmoniously with all their other impulses."[3]
"In spite of the age-long teachings that sex life in itself is unclean," Margaret Sanger writes in "Woman and the New Race," the world has been moving to a realization that A GREAT LOVE BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN IS A HOLY THING freighted with great responsibilities for spiritual growth. The fear of unwanted children removed, the assurance that she will have a sufficient amount of time in which to develop her love life to its greatest beauty, with its comradeship in many fields--these will lift woman by the very soaring quality of her innermost self to spiritual heights that few have attained. Then the coming of the eagerly desired children will but enrich life in all its avenues, rather than enslave and impoverish it as do unwanted ones to-day.