SECTION IVThe Bridge to Womanhood
Chapter 13THE POWER OF LOVE
We have come now to the last and most important part of our journey together, to the point where we can examine the means by which real love can be achieved. Let us start by examining what real love is, its role in life and its component parts.
Because of their problems in loving, many people arrive at a point where they turn against love itself. Having lost their hope of achieving love, they quite humanly tend to depreciate it, try to minimize its importance. One of the commonest statements I hear from frigid patients in the first interview goes something like this: “Well, it really doesn’t matter, I suppose; there aren’t very many happy marriages anyway. And I suppose there are more important things than love.”
Let us correct any tendency of this kind right here and now.
Using the word in its widest sense, I would say that the ability to love is the single most important characteristic that man has. It is the faculty upon which all the great actions, hopes, and aspirations of the world are founded. Withoutit there could be no brotherhood among men, and therefore the very concept of civilization as we understand it would be unknown, even unthinkable. Men would be essentially isolated individuals whose personal drives, needs, and appetites would be the only realities to them. Aloneness, a terrible loneliness (those who cannot love will know what I mean), would be mankind’s lot.
Love means, in its very deepest sense, union; union between individuals, between women and women, men and men, men and women. It is the most basic and profound urge we have, and its power for good is illimitable.
In love we make the good of our partner (whether he is our child, our neighbor, or our sweetheart) as important to us as our own good. In the union of love we are able to experience the essential oneness of man and nature, to know that the universe is indeed our home and all men within it members of our family. In this way man learns through love that he is not alone, not condemned to the pain and anxiety he experiences when he has nobody with whom he can share his mind, his heart, his body.
The concept of this happy unity is most clearly seen in the love between men and women. The act of sexual love is a direct expression of it. Two individuals once unknown to each other, until recently total strangers, now nevertheless literally merge together physically, know each other in the closest of physical embraces. They were miraculously made for this purpose, constructed for this union. The man leaves something of himself within the woman, his sperm. And a part of the woman joins this, merges with it. They have indeed become one flesh.
And this merging, in addition to the joy and comfort it brings to each to join with the other as one, can become a creative act. From the union a child may be created. Thuswe see that the profound result of the union which always characterizes love is productivity, creation.
If this physical coupling were all there was, it would be miraculous still, though an experience shared by other than human forms of life. But man, as distinct from animals, has mind. And minds, as well as bodies, have the capacity to merge too, the need to, the profound joy in so doing. It is when body and mind of a man and woman merge, become a unity, that we see the highest expression of what we term love.
When two people are able to join as one in love, there are certain very definite things that happen to them, as far as each individual mind is concerned.
In the first place, each is able to come far closer to his or her own potentialities. The merging that takes place in psychological love is essentially creative (just as its physical counterpart is), and so each lover is able to come closer and closer to his true self. All who have ever loved know of this inward blossoming, this fecundation by the love of the other. In work, in play, in all the inner and outer activities of life, the individual becomes far more vital and more productive than before.
Another important aspect of love: to each, as I have said, the love partner becomes as important as oneself, and from this it follows that the good of the loved one is all important to the other. Thus all things that help the other, cause him to be joyful, secure, freely and completely himself, become a chief concern of the other. This fact is why real love never leads to domination or to a struggle for power between two people. Through the mersion of love the uniqueness and individuality of the other person becomes precious, and hence all effort is made to guard the special qualities of the beloved. In love we never encounter a man trampling on his wife’s rights and needs or a woman competing with her husband.The value of the other as he is and as he can grow to be becomes the highest value in life.
Because of the high value she places upon her loved one a woman makes the understanding of him one of her most important activities. And this understanding furthers love, which in turn furthers understanding, so that the process is a very dynamic one. By gaining a knowledge of her loved one she is able ultimately to go to the very root of his personality, thus making an even deeper merging of her with him possible. Such understanding implies, of course, a great sensitivity to all of his reactions. And it makes her, too, inquire urgently (and creatively) into herself, so that no blocks to their deep psychological communion can develop.
These are, then, some of the results of real love. I have listed them as a rebuttal of and a reminder to any who have, through repeated defeat, become discouraged in their struggles to love and have tended therefore to minimize love’s importance. There is nothing in life that is so important as love. In fact, as one of my patients once said, looking back on the period when she was unable to love, “Without love there is nothing in life.”
One cannot win the battle to love if one minimizes it. The frigid woman, above all, must realize this and never give up her struggle. Indeed, a complete awareness of how important love is can be in itself a big step along the way to achieving the ability to love and to be loved.
Now if we summarize what has just been said about love, what do we find is its essential characteristic? This: the ability to see the other personas he isand to esteem him above everything else for his individual quality, indeed to love him (and so want to merge with him) for it.
On the other hand, if we were to summarize all the case histories of the various forms of frigidity I have given and all the other pertinent facts I have adduced about frigidity, wewould find just the opposite fact. The frigid woman, of whatever variety she may be,never sees the man she wants to love as he is. His individual and essential quality is entirely unknown to her and unknowable by her. He is a series of projections from her past. He is a composite of the fears, the errors, the misunderstandings of her infancy and childhood. The real union of love is therefore impossible with this quasi monster she has conjured up.
Thus we can see that the major task of the frigid woman is to rid herself of these projections she makes upon mankind in general and upon her own man in particular. She must see through them and divest herself of them, come to see men in their true role vis-à-vis woman and her husband in all his uniqueness and with all his potentiality.
That is step one.
When she has done this there is another step she must take. If one thinks of the description of love I have given, one realizes that it implies a very great security within oneself, an acceptance of one’s own uniqueness and essential femininity. But the frigid woman fears and rejects femininity, as we have seen, feeling it to be a dangerous trap. She must learn to alter this basic and negative attitude entirely. She must see how childish and false, how utterly self-depriving this view of womanhood is and give it up.
Thus we see that in frigidity the two main doors to psychological and sexual union—to love, in short—have been closed and locked.
If these two doors can be opened again, the frigid woman will have resolved her problem.
Just these two doors? Is this not an oversimplification? To these two questions I can give unequivocal answers: yes to the first and no to the second. These are the two roots of the problem. Attack them head on, resolve them, and the major part of the task has been done.