How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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those who find love not a path toward peace and harmony
and the development of the spirit, but an intolerable cross
which not only burdens the flesh but cripples and
distorts the spirit. To be sure, all happily married couples
take their sexual happiness as,a matter of course, just as
those who have good digestions do not announce with a
fanfare of trumpets the fact that they have just been
able to digest their supper. As soon as there is an
unhappy marriage, there are two human beings who
wish to justify and excuse themselves for the failure of
their cooperation. While our newspapers shriek the
unhappiness of love to us from their headlines, there are,
nevertheless, many human beings who find the most
innate satisfaction of their lives in their love relations
and in the institution of marriage, no matter in what form
nor in what social stratum it exists. While the ratio of
unhappy love affairs and loveless marriages to successful
and happy marriages cannot be computed, the existence
of good marriages and happy love cannot be doubted.
And of the unhappy love lives this may be said : the
great majority are due to avoidable causes. To the discussion
of these avoidable causes of sexual discontent we must
give our attention, and we propose the novel method of
analysing the unhappy marriages and the broken love
lives, not according to any moral or traditional criteria,
but as if they were unsuccessful experiments in the living
laboratory found in the mental hygiene clinic and the
psychiatric consultation room. From the examination of
these failures we shall attempt to deduce certain general
laws of conduct which may be of use to those who feel
their own love fading, or those who are about to embark
upon this most thrilling of all human cooperative ventures.
To begin with, wre should sketch the essentials of a
happy love life in order to orientate ourselves in the
evaluation of the unhappy and unsatisfactory marriages
we find in every social group* But we are immediately
faced with an insuperable problem. There is no definite
norm of happiness in marriage, nor any absolute law which
governs human relations in this most artistic of human