How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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happy sexual relations. “ Falling in love ” is the happy reward of a correctly and normally lived life a deux, not the foundation of a sexual relation. If this simple psychological truth were more commonly recognized, much of the romantic twaddle of our neurotic drama and literature would disappear, as would many of the post- marital tragedies now all too commonly found in divorce court and clinic. Romantic Hocus-pocus : Falling in Love The psychological process of falling in love may best be likened to the operation of those electrical robots which are actuated to the performance of the most complicated functions by the application of the appropriate stimulus. As soon as the proper word is uttered, the entire compli¬ cated mechanism is set in motion and no prayer will stop it from the performance of its mechanical task. The romantic idealist is like such an electrical robot. His psychological antennae are attuned to a certain stimulus predetermined by the experiences of his early childhood. For instance, a girl who throughout her childhood was pampered only by an indulgent father, a robust grey¬ haired man with a deep bass voice and a hearty booming laugh (while her four brothers, all slight in build, were always cruel to her), goes through life with her psychic antennae “ set by her early childhood conditioning for the favourable reception of just such another big man with a booming laugh and grey hair. It is her unconscious hope that the recapitulation of the physical background will bring the same players and the same drama to the stage of her life. Of the thousands of men she meets in the course of her thirty-five years of life, no one quite fits the pattern, and she manages to find objections to all other men because her psychic antennae have never “ tuned in ” on exactly the right stimuli. Then, on a steamer going to America, the young lady meets Mr. G,, who presents just the right stimulus. He