Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXremembered, necessarily wives of the husbands examined)regarded their husbands' potency as defective. It may benoted, however, that both the husbands and the wiveswho regarded themselves as below the average in sexualisindeed a common experience and maydesire presented a higher percentage of fairly to highlysatisfactory marriages compared to those who rate themselvesas equal to or above the average in sex desire. Thiswell be rememberedby those who look upon marriage as a mainly sexualrelationship and imagine that a high degree of sexualactivity is essential to happiness in marriage. Dickinson'sgynecological explorations, only indirectly concerned withhusbands, seem to show that about 6 per cent of themwere impotent.We have to bear in mind that both excess and defectof sexual feeling may cooperate to produce sexual impotence.It is an important consideration since one of thegreat nervous terrors surrounding marriage in somemen's minds a terror which may also occur apart altogetherfrom marriage as well as in later stages of the stateis connected with the doubt as to potency. A comparativeabsence of sexual power and sexual impulse, from onecause or another, is more common in men than is some*times recognized. The number of marriages, indeed, isbyno means small in which from this cause conjugal relationsare not effected, and such unions are by no means.always below the average in happiness. But the suspicionthat he isimpotent although such sexual quiescence isa goal which others are vainly longing to attain causesthe average man extreme anxiety, so that he ispreparedto adopt any course of treatment and often to resort toany of the quacks who are prepared to trade on these terrors.A temporaryloss of potency under a high emotionalstrain may easilyoccur and is not[304]of any serious import.