Page:Fielding - Sex and the Love Life.pdf/128

ual feeling from love, particularly in the case of young people about to be married, or even among those who are married, and to disparage the human body, has produced unfortunate results that are far-reaching.

Besides neuroses and the frequent proclivity toward vice, which is unconsciously encouraged by treating a natural subject in a mysterious manner, some of the grosser sex perversions, it is agreed among authorities, are traceable to this spirit of audacity and morbid impulse to impropriety.

It should be universally realized that conjugal love is an inseparable combination of physical and spiritual, or psychic, elements, and any disregard of one or the other, or suppression of useful self-knowledge, prevents an honest understanding of the subject which will prove distinctly conducive to marital disharmony. The psychic component of connubial love, indeed, is often just as little understood by those who are prone to undervalue or defame the physical element. To properly understand the subject, it is necessary to consider the physical and the psychic phases as complementary and interdependent.

Wooing as an Essential Preparation. Throughout nature, the male woos the female before every act of copulation. The intensity and elaboration of the wooing depends upon the erotic characteristics of the species. The process is an inevitable one, however. It is never dispensed with in the sexual relations in the animal world.

The meaning of all this is organic preparation for the sexual act. Wooing is a form of erotic preparation, physical and mental. Even much of the physical preparation depends upon the mental attitude toward the subject, although there