Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/242

 wishes to make a marriage where only the semblance of one now exists, must now examine his attitudes with great honesty, courage, and thoroughness.

The way ahead of him at the beginning will not be by any means clear or easygoing. The initial progress of his wife as she undertakes to change is often barely perceptible. Why should he have any hope that anything new, exciting, or beautiful could develop from such tentative starts? And what motive can he develop to turn back, emotionally and sexually, to a woman who has so often and so thoroughly rejected and frustrated him? A very strong part of him feels that he has worked out a precarious inner and outer equilibrium which at least keeps this semblance of marriage from falling apart entirely. He generally actively resents the demand on him to alter his attitude, to see his wife through the inner odyssey on which she now wishes to embark.

We have found that at such a juncture a husband is often helped to alter his defensive attitude by seriously reflecting on the picture of marriage and love he had when he first fell in love with his wife. He should then compare that image of a relationship with the custom-staled and defeated feelings he has now, compare his first hopes of creatively shared lives with the empty realities of the present, the time-*wasting, essentially loveless activities he now engages in.

Memories and thoughts of this kind can make him angry, the way a man can get angry, healthfully and aggressively; not at his wife, who now wants to make up for all that has been lost, but at himself for his passive acceptance and easy adjustment to a defeated life, a life that has become a resigned and pointless existence. Such anger is good because it can clear his inner atmosphere; it can start him back with renewed resolution on the road to his real desires. For no man who feels worthy of his manhood ever really accepts a half existence in love of the kind I have just depicted.