Some profligate men suffer from an impotence, of which there are several varieties:
1. Impotentia coeundi, or defect, complete or partial, of power to copulate.
2. Impotentia generandi, or inability to become fathers on account of a lack of spermatozoids in the semen.
3. Relative Impotence; i.e., a man may be perfectly potent with some women who fulfil his perverted ideals, but impotent with others; thus, a man may be unable to consummate the sexual act with his wife, but quite able to succeed with prostitutes; or he may be potent only if the woman be entirely nude, while another similarly affected man might require her to be dressed in some peculiar manner, wearing the articles which form his fetich, before he could induce orgasua.
4. Psychical Impotence; i.e., some nervous men, especially those who have resorted to unnatural means of sexual gratification, and those who are frightened by the acquisition of venereal disease, labor under great nervous excitement from a fear of inability to perform their conjugal duties; in the marriage relationship they are chagrined at failure, but may yet be able to copulate satisfactorily with prostitutes.
A multitude of married men, supposedly reformed profligates, continue to frequent women in secret, though they bave promised by their marriage vows to jraard their wives or else endure the worst; but the women allied with them in marriage consented to do what Portia wisely refused to do "if I should marry him, I should marry twenty husbands".
Some statisticians say that seventy five per cent of marriages are unhappy; nor can it be wondered at so long as a debased society continues to condone profligacy. " Unlike the women [harlots], the men are drawn from no single class, condition, or age in the community, but from all alike. They are drawn into the vortex by an instinct, it is true, but not a natural one a perverted one. It is astonishing how little 'passion' there is in the trade on either side. So far from the 'hot blood of youth' being chiefly responsible, houses of ill fame derive two thirds of their income from married men over forty".
A woman who gets a husband whose sexual excitability is dependent upon peculiar perverted stimuli, which are outside of her power to gratify, will hardly be able to keep him from going to strumpets, who alone can, and will, pleasurably stimulate his corrupted tastes; nor can she reasonably hope that these extraordinarily powerful and imperative concepts will ever be rooted out from his psycho sexual life. Marriage cannot be relied upon to transform such men's natures, nor to eradicate the impressions which their former lascivious modes of life have fixed as indelible stains on those brain cells which are concerned in the phenomena of memory and imagination.
Those who spend the best years of their lives in seeking for illegitimate pleasures, which their reason, if used, would lead them to shun, inevitably get the sting of pain and sorrow for their reward. That is not the way to be happy, nor can any justification be found for leading a reckless life which is injurious to oneself and many others.
The essentials of the secret of a happy marriage, by de-duction from the foregoing, may be shortly summed up as follows:
That the man and woman shall be well mated physically, sexually and mentally, in harmony in their moral sympathies, and possessed of the normal sexual inclinations and longings; that each shall enter into the relationship in virginity, chastity and modesty, and that neither shall be the slave of polluted imperious mental concepts; that each shall represent the sum total of sexual possibilities for the other, upon assurance of which there can hardly be jealousy or suspicion;
that they shall appreciate that marriage is, in a sense, an immortal relationship, their lives continuing in their posterity; that the husband shall regard his wife with a deep reverence as occupying the throne of nature, considering her sex and her potentiality for motherhood as sacred, and that the wife shall be able to confide in the sure faithfulness and protection of the husband for herself and offspring; and that the foundations of their conjugal relationship shall be laid in a love which will bind them together and cause them to endure all and suffer all for each other's sake.