of inestimable value in maintaining a long and happy union
between man and woman in marriage.

The married couple should, therefore, avoid everything which may
rupture this link. The wife should devote herself to making the home
attractive to her husband. The latter, on his part, should neither
regard his wife as a mere housekeeper, nor only as an object for the
satisfaction of his sexual appetite. Such a conception of woman and
marriage is unfortunately very common and is incompatible with true
conjugal happiness.

On the other hand, it is not enough for the husband to esteem and
respect his wife as a faithful companion, to whom he is united in a
purely intellectual way. For the couple to find lasting and complete
happiness in marriage, love, however ideal it may be, should be
accompanied by sexual enjoyment. In short, intellectual and
sentimental harmony should be combined with sensual harmony in a
single and sublime symphony. The husband should not only regard his
wife as the incarnation of all the domestic virtues, but should also
continue to imagine her as the Venus of his early love.

This condition may be realized even when youth has passed away,
provided the deep sympathetic sentiments of an ideal love have truly
existed and are maintained. The wife will then continue to be for her
husband the goddess she has always been. But if this condition is not
realized it is not always easy for the husband, with his polygamous
disposition, to remain insensible to the charms of other women.
However, habit and imagination may do much to correct this tendency.

I think the following advice may be useful to the husband (and
occasionally also to the wife). When his sexual passion is excited by
another woman and he is in danger of succumbing, he should endeavor,
by the aid of his imagination, to clothe his own wife with the charms
of his would-be seducer. With a little determination this measure will
often succeed; he will thus strengthen his sexual desire toward his
own wife, and perhaps increase hers also. In this way, a flame which
threatened to destroy conjugal happiness may sometimes serve to
strengthen it, by reviving afresh the mutual feelings of love and
desire. In the first part of his "Wahlverwandtschaften" (elective
affinities), Goethe designates this phenomenon by the term _mental
adultery_; but I am of the opinion that it is rather the expression of
a _mental conjugal fidelity_ which is strengthened by sensual