The Power of Sexual Surrender

When a woman decides to cross the bridge from frigidity to mature femininity her husband’s attitudes, feelings, and reactions can be all-important.

I said earlier that we have found that the man is rarely responsible for his wife’s frigidity; that it developed long before he met her. However, he must understand that, when she begins to assume responsibility for her difficulty, responsibilities of a new kind are thrust on him too. In the beginning at least, and contrary to what he might expect of himself, he may not like these responsibilities at all. He may find that he has a very negative attitude toward his wife’s attempt to mature, that indeed he does not want her to.

It is very necessary for a man to understand the elements that make his role appear to him to be very difficult during such a period. In a sense, if the project is to succeed, he must be as aware of his reactions as his wife is of hers.

What, then, are the main elements of his reactions?

In the first place, the husband of a frigid woman generally has a great store of repressed resentment toward his wife. This is quite understandable, of course. He has been the chief recipient of her very strong negative feelings toward life, people, love, and sex.

As we have seen, the frigid woman has a strong tendency to blame others for her difficulties. Her husband, doubtlessly, has received his full quota of such irrational blame from her. He has also been the main victim of all the other neurotic components of frigidity—the envy and mistrust she has of the entire male sex, the endless complaints she directs against her household duties, her general inability to handle even the trivia of every woman’s everyday life with any grace or ease.

In addition to her quarreling and complaints he has had to accept a tremendous amount of emotional frustration. Frigidity does not permit much honest or real interpersonal warmth, and the male has had to do without a normal amount of affection. His sexual frustration, too, is great. We saw in the case of the clitoridal woman just how laborious and boring the act of love can become to the man. It is not necessary to labor the point of how cumulatively bleak sexual intercourse with an unresponding partner can become.

All this (and more) that a man has gone through with a frigid wife must have a very definite effect on him. He builds up attitudes and develops defenses which allow him to preserve his equilibrium within the framework of his marriage as it is.

Some of these defenses are psychological, some external.

The chief psychological defense he uses is a general withdrawal; he pulls back from “caring” about the unhappy circumstances of his married life. He may cease to react, either to his wife’s attacks on him or to her general complaints. He may cease, too, to care very much about the failure of their sexual life. His withdrawal from the problem may be marked by actual sexual impotence with his wife. Or he may, in response to his wife’s rejection of sex, take a purely mechanical attitude toward intercourse, getting it over with as quickly as possible, taking it like a hurried but necessary meal.

His external defenses against his home life may be a withdrawal from it. He may reorganize his social life around a men’s social or athletic club, spending a great deal of time with “the boys.” He may take to drinking at bars in the evening, forming a circle of cronies whom he likes to be with. He may do any of a number of things that take him out of his home in the evening and give him substitute pleasures.

Now of course there is nothing the least bit reprehensible about the erection of such defenses if one’s marriage and home life are unsatisfactory. Indeed, such defenses may keep a marriage together by allowing the man to get some compensatory pleasures out of life.

One husband said just this in so many words to me recently. “If I hadn’t taken a firm stand within myself,” he told me, “the marriage would have broken up long ago. I simply decided that, if things were to work out at all, I just had to pull back from her and not take what she said to me seriously. If I went on believing half of the attacks she made on me I couldn’t have lived with myself. And since sex was no fun, what was there left between us? I’ve made up a social life of sorts outside of the family for myself. At least I get a little fun out of life, and since I’m not around mainly I’m not boring her so much and she’s not boring me so much.”

But the danger is that such defenses and such compensatory activities will be held onto even if the marriage has been given a chance to turn from a meaningless one into a deeply meaningful and joyful one. A husband who wishes to help his wife in her struggle to become a woman, who wishes to make a marriage where only the semblance of one now exists, must now examine his attitudes with great honesty, courage, and thoroughness.

The way ahead of him at the beginning will not be by any means clear or easygoing. The initial progress of his wife as she undertakes to change is often barely perceptible. Why should he have any hope that anything new, exciting, or beautiful could develop from such tentative starts? And what motive can he develop to turn back, emotionally and sexually, to a woman who has so often and so thoroughly rejected and frustrated him? A very strong part of him feels that he has worked out a precarious inner and outer equilibrium which at least keeps this semblance of marriage from falling apart entirely. He generally actively resents the demand on him to alter his attitude, to see his wife through the inner odyssey on which she now wishes to embark.

We have found that at such a juncture a husband is often helped to alter his defensive attitude by seriously reflecting on the picture of marriage and love he had when he first fell in love with his wife. He should then compare that image of a relationship with the custom-staled and defeated feelings he has now, compare his first hopes of creatively shared lives with the empty realities of the present, the time-wasting, essentially loveless activities he now engages in.

Memories and thoughts of this kind can make him angry, the way a man can get angry, healthfully and aggressively; not at his wife, who now wants to make up for all that has been lost, but at himself for his passive acceptance and easy adjustment to a defeated life, a life that has become a resigned and pointless existence. Such anger is good because it can clear his inner atmosphere; it can start him back with renewed resolution on the road to his real desires. For no man who feels worthy of his manhood ever really accepts a half existence in love of the kind I have just depicted.

We have found, too, that such husbands can remotivate themselves if they will contemplate the potentialities of womanhood toward which their wives now consciously aspire. I have tried throughout this book to show, in some of their variety, the magnificent and exciting qualities that characterize true womanhood. I have shown how giving women can be in their love, how supportive, how filled with deep warmth and understanding. And I have tried to show how, in sex itself, there is no responsiveness that can compare even remotely with that of a loved and emotionally secure woman. If at this critical point in his marriage a man can clarify what he really wants and then develop the patience to wait for it, he will be most thoroughly rewarded.

Patience is very important. He will need all of it he can muster for a time and, at certain points, he may have to remind himself hard of the rewards at the end of the journey. He can, we find, be greatly helped by having as thorough a knowledge as possible of the psychological problems his wife will encounter in her hegira to womanhood.

I have shown that the path to feminine maturity is not a straight one. The traveler will often become frightened of the very progress she is making and for a short time will tend to pull back into her former neurotic defenses. At such a point the husband must be very clear that she has not pulled back for good.

The critical period, as we have seen, in a woman’s forward march, the thing that is apt to make her pull back most strongly and with most anxiety, is her first encounter with real orgasm. However, the husband must realize once more that this regression is temporary, too, even though it lasts for several weeks or, in some cases, longer. The solicitude of her husband at this point and the reassurance she gets from the knowledge of his love can be the main factors in her final victory over her difficulty.

Many psychiatrists make it a practice to discuss with husbands, whenever it is feasible, the importance of their role in the complete recovery of their wives. It is a very rare man who, after such discussions, cannot or will not mobilize his resources to aid his wife and to see her through her hard struggle. And I know of no woman who has won a victory over her frigidity who has ignored the fact that her husband’s help was decisive.

In addition to changing his defensive attitude toward his wife (or perhaps searching for and recapturing his earlier feelings toward her), in what other ways can a husband be helpful to his wife as she struggles toward maturity?

I would say that the primary virtue he should cultivate in himself is sensitivity, particularly sensitivity to any advances or changes in her manner of relating to him, to their children, or to friends in their immediate circle. She is trying to rid herself of a lifelong mistrust of men and fear of them. She is trying to dare to be soft, warm, and giving. Every recognition she gets for her efforts will be like manna to her. In many ways she is like a frightened child, and only total acceptance can give her enough courage to advance further.

Let me give a simple example of what I mean: The relationship between a woman patient of mine and her husband had, in the course of their five-year marriage, deteriorated sadly. In their courtship days they had been in the habit of giving each other gifts, frequent and personally meaningful gifts. But now, even on birthdays, they bought presents “for the home” rather than for each other.

During the course of our work the wife, one cold winter day, on the spur of a tender moment, bought her husband a very bright yellow scarf and presented it to him that night. I learned later from him that his first impulse on receiving the gift was to laugh. He dressed most conservatively, and the garish scarf was very much out of keeping with his tastes.

He did not laugh, however, realizing that the gift was an expression of something new in his wife, that it showed a new concern for him and an attempt to begin to show it. Instead he kissed her tenderly and wore the scarf to his office the next day. When he came home that night he presented her with a lovely platinum watch of a make he had once heard her admire. “She looked down for a moment,” he told me, “as though she were confused, and then she looked up at me and put her arms around me and wept a very long time.” Those tears, of course, were the sure beginning of a deep thaw. His sensitivity to his wife’s need at this point in her life had been a decisive element, and her progress from that point on was greatly accelerated.

In counseling husbands to be sensitively attentive to their wives’ needs during this period of change I must warn against one thing. Insincerity or artificiality will not work at all, indeed could actually be harmful. Women are deeply intuitive and can detect any hypocritical attempt to manipulate them. It is not wise to try to express love if you do not feel it. A man who cannot experience real feeling toward his wife should put his main effort into self-inquiry. He may discover that the anger and hurt that have built up in him during the unhappy years that are past are too great to handle alone and he may wish to discuss these intransigent feelings with a counselor or psychiatrist.

I know of one man who, paying lip service to the idea of helping his wife, put in a weekly order at the local florist shop for flowers. When in the next three months she had received “enough,” as she put it, “for an elaborate funeral,” she begged him to stop sending them.

Another man, having ignored any social life with his wife for years, was told that she should get away from her household duties occasionally. He suddenly insisted, therefore, on dragging her on a round of night clubs and theater parties that would have exhausted Elsa Maxwell. His wife was essentially rather shy and withdrawn and of course resented this enforced and artificial approach to her real needs.

Women rightly consider these kinds of gestures a mockery, an expression of a latent hostility toward them rather than as an expression of love. Of course women love luxury, going out, gifts—but only when they express a sensitive awareness on the part of the giver. A rule of thumb that works is to do what one feels but to refrain firmly from doing what one doesn’t feel. Somebody once said that the proper mixture for the real lover is 80 per cent male aggression and 20 per cent feminine sensitivity. The formula has much to recommend it.

One important thing that husbands and wives must learn to do is to share their deeper thoughts, problems, and feelings with one another. Over the years the general withdrawal of both partners has made communication of any kind most superficial, and hope of any important contact through conversation has been abandoned almost entirely. When the wife has finally told her husband of her determination to attack her problem frontally, the couple now have a new opportunity for establishing deep lines of communication. If the husband can seize on this new chance, divest himself of his lonely and habitual reticence, he can help his wife and their entire relationship immeasurably.

Everything may be discussed in such conversations, although one should avoid any recrimination or “confessions” that would hurt the other. Conversation about one’s emotional or reality difficulties, about one’s loneliness, plans, successes, fears, and hopes, are deeply moving to a woman. If a man can learn to share his real inner life with his wife it will help her to realize once more the importance of the woman’s role, make her know that she has her husband’s confidence in those things that are of real importance to him.

As I have pointed out, frigid women have little knowledge of what men are really like. Basically they see men as “powers,” without worries or fears. When they learn from their husbands’ own lips their real feelings, these women are very greatly aided in changing their underlying attitudes.

One woman told me that her whole marriage-long conception of her husband had been completely altered by one emotional confession from him. She had told him that she had finally realized her frigidity had been the cause of the problem between them and that she had determined to attempt to change herself. He listened quietly as she talked and was silent for a moment when she finished. Then he said in a low voice: “I have been terribly lonely without you.” This honest communication reached past all her neurotic defenses, informed her simply and directly how important her decision was to him, how human and needful the husband she had feared and rejected really was.

It is in such real, such personal exchanges with his wife that a man most often begins to reap the rewards his wife’s decision to change will bring him. As he expresses himself more and her security in him deepens, he begins to encounter the depths of tranquillity that have always lain beneath her defensive exterior; he begins to feel her great capacity to give him something that he has missed, missed terribly—a companionship, support, and love that ask for nothing but to be needed. In this way a new and profound mutuality develops and, cleared of the fears that have impeded it, the real marriage between these two people can begin to flourish.

In the sexual aspect of the marriage, as in its psychological aspect, sensitivity is also the key word for the husband who wishes to help his wife.

In every case of frigidity that I have encountered the sexual life between husband and wife has, through the years, become an extremely self-conscious one. The wife generally is acutely aware of every genital sensation that she has or every sensation that she does not have. Her chronic sense of failure is at the root of this hawk-like attention to her reactions. Often this self-concern has been encouraged by reading books that emphasize the mechanical aspects of sexual love, giving her false hopes that somehow she is going to be able to solve her orgastic problem if she can only get in the right position, make the right movement, contract the right muscles at the right time, or teach her husband the right techniques.

Under such circumstances it is impossible for a husband not to react to his wife’s hyper-narcissism. He tends then to put his awareness of her experience ahead of his own enjoyment. This is one of the prime reasons why the sex act for both of them has become anxious and dull.

In sex one’s body can feel only its own raptures. Even the exquisite sensation of giving the partner pleasure is psychological and, by definition, important only when it heightens one’s pleasure, not when it decreases it.

It is very important, therefore, for the husband to drop his self-consciousness about his wife’s pleasures or lack of them during intercourse. In fact, both must start with a clean slate on this score, take the healthy natural view that sexual sensation is a self-centered, even selfish, matter basically. Overconcern for the other can rob it of its lusty spontaneity entirely.

This may strike a man as a new conception. In most books on married sexuality the mutuality of the act is the point emphasized; such books always speak glowingly of the pleasure one experiences in the other’s reactions. When frigidity is present this “mutuality” can become a mockery.

A woman suffering from frigidity will be very relieved if her husband will make a gentle but blanket announcement to her that she is to drop her entire concern with orgasm until it happens. I have pointed out before that this indeed must be her working attitude before she has her first orgasmic experience. For a husband to affirm that this attitude is also his can be a great reassurance to her. She will then allow herself to really enjoy his “selfish” ecstasy without neurotically fixing on her own localized sensations. Indulging the deeply feminine role of giving pleasure can be more exciting to her than any other thing.

Now a word about foreplay—in my opinion one of the most grossly misunderstood words in the language. Many men, and women too, take it to mean solely a duty-bound interval in which a man tries to arouse a woman by physically caressing and kissing her. This mechanistic interpretation is based on the oft-quoted statement that women are slower to respond sexually than men and that it is the man’s duty to arouse her.

I think it is absolutely necessary for this particular conception of foreplay to be expanded considerably where women who have had a sexual difficulty are concerned. As we have seen over and over again, frigidity in women is caused by psychological problems of a very specific kind. Any exclusively mechanical approach to these difficulties is foredoomed to failure.

Husbands of women with a frigidity problem are well advised to consider foreplay primarily a psychological rather than a physical matter.

If you will recall the stages of development the growing girl goes through, you will remember that they culminate in adolescence. During that stage a long romantic dream prepares the girl for real love. This dream of romance never leaves a woman. Foreplay is most successful when it arouses these dormant romantic feelings. Woman is truly an incurable romantic.

But what does romance really mean to her? And how can the romantic feeling be conjured up?

Romantic feelings are aroused in a woman when she feels that her husband’s entire emotion is fixed on her tenderly and lovingly. She feels romantic when all the other goals and needs and duties of life are for the time being relinquished. In such a situation she dares to relax, to loaf and invite her soul, to concentrate on her deep belief that love is centrally important, the thing that gives life its meaning and its beauty. Every woman, at the heart’s deep core, wishes to give all for love.

Such a mood of romance cannot, of course, be bumped up suddenly, nor can it be created by a man who feels cynical or abashed by it. To woo a woman successfully, a man must believe in her dream of love and become a passionate sharer in it.

Certain things that remove a couple for a while from the highly goal-centered activities of daily life help to create this romantic mood. A housewife will respond to a luxurious evening out; putting on an evening gown can separate her from her housekeeping, penny-pinching view of herself, and the sight of her husband in a tuxedo can fill her romantic cup to the brim. A few champagnes and dancing to a good orchestra, and the magic is complete.

Picnics together, too, can engender a deeply romantic feeling in a wife. But of course the children should not be along. And the whole thing should be carried off with a little style. Wine, a good one, is a must, and the man should know beforehand of a fine and very private spot for the picnic.

I have known several women who have broken through the barriers of sexual frigidity during ocean cruises. These seem to represent the romantic circumstance par excellence, and a husband who can afford them should add them to his loving calculations.

In my opinion, husbands and wives should arrange their lives to get some vacation time alone together. With even the best intentions the duties and responsibilities of life close in on one, tend to take some of the bloom off the rose. A week, a month if possible, alone together can help to re-establish vitality and meaning in a marriage.

The fact that a man has stayed with a woman despite her frigidity and the problems it causes is a testament to the abiding love he has for her. If he will forget his old despair now that his wife has taken responsibility in the relationship, call on his real manhood to reassert itself in helping her to her goal, his rewards can be as bounteous as femininity can bestow.