Yet there can be no doubt whatever that the other group of men, the men who enter marriage without any erotic experiences, run even greater risks.  These are often the best of men, both as regards personal character and mental power.  It is indeed astonishing to find how ignorant, both practically and theoretically, very able and highly educated men may be concerning sexual matters.

“Complete abstinence during youth,” says Freud (Sexual-Probleme, March, 1908), “is not the best preparation for marriage in a young man.  Women divine this and prefer those of their wooers who have already proved themselves to be men with other women.”  Ellen Key, referring to the demand sometimes made by women for purity in men (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 96), asks whether women realize the effect of their admiration of the experienced and confident man who knows women, on the shy and hesitating youth, “who perhaps has been struggling hard for his erotic purity, in the hope that a woman’s happy smile will be the reward of his conquest, and who is condemned to see how that woman looks down on him with lofty compassion and gazes with admiration at the leopard’s spots.”  When the lover, in Laura Marholm’s Was war es? says to the heroine, “I have never yet touched a woman,” the girl “turns from him with horror, and it seemed to her that a cold shudder went through her, a chilling deception.”  The same feeling is manifested in an exaggerated form in the passion often experienced by vigorous girls of eighteen to twenty-four for old roues. (This has been discussed by Forel, Die Sexuelle Frage, pp. 217 et seq.)

Other factors may enter in a woman’s preference for the man who has conquered other women.  Even the most religious and moral young woman, Valera remarks (Dona Luz, p. 205), likes to marry a man who has loved many women; it gives a greater value to his choice of her; it also offers her an opportunity of converting him to higher ideals.  No doubt when the inexperienced man meets in marriage the equally inexperienced woman they often succeed in adapting themselves to each other and a permanent modus vivendi is constituted.  But it is by no means so always.  If the wife is taught by instinct or experience she is apt to resent the awkwardness and helplessness of her husband in the art of love.  Even if she is ignorant she may be permanently alienated and become chronically frigid, through the brutal inconsiderateness of her ignorant husband in carrying out what he conceives to be his marital duties. (It has already been necessary to touch on this point in discussing “The Sexual Impulse in Women” in vol. iii of these Studies.) Sometimes, indeed, serious physical injury has been inflicted on the bride owing to this ignorance of the husband.

“I take it that most men have had pre-matrimonial sex-relationships,” a correspondent writes.  “But I have known one man at least who, up till the age of twenty,