If we are to have a more rationalized form of social control, then, it will undoubtedly take into consideration the necessity of forming the socially desirable conditionings of the emotional life.  The importance of the emotional reactions for social progress has been very well summarized by Burgess, who says that emotion can be utilized for breaking down old customs and establishing new ones, as well as for the conservation of the mores.  Society can largely determine around what stimuli the emotions can be organized, this author continues, and the group has indeed always sought to control the stimuli impinging upon its members.  One policy has been to eliminate objectionable stimuli, as in the outlawing of the saloon.  The other is to change the nature of the affective response of the individual to certain stimuli in the environment where the natural or organic responses would be at variance with conduct considered socially desirable.[3]

Modern psychological knowledge enables us to understand the mechanism of this last method of social control as the building up of the conditioned emotional response.  If our civilization is to endure it must learn to apply this method of control to the sex life of the individual so that reproduction will fall to the lot of the most desirable eugenic stock instead of being left to the workings of chance as it is at the present time.

From the viewpoint of individual psychology, one of the principal problems of the erotic life is to find a smooth transition from the romantic love of the courtship period to the less ethereal emotions of the married state.  Indirectly, this is also socially significant, because of the overwhelming effect of the home environment in shaping the reactions of the next generation.  As a rule, only the children who have grown up in a happy and wholesome atmosphere of sincere parental comradeship and affection can have an entirely sane and healthy reaction to their own erotic functions in later years.

Although romantic love in its present expression may often lead to uncongenial marriages and even involve dysgenic mating, its aesthetic and refining influences are such as to make it desirable in spite of these drawbacks.  Its influence upon literature has been noted by Bloch[2] while its potency in the formation of a deep and tender feeling between men and women has been elaborately discussed by Finck.[4] Thus it is evident that its individual and social advantages more than balance its disadvantages.

Unfortunately, with the entrance into the marital relationship and the release of the erotic emotion into natural channels so that it no longer seeks the vicarious outlets which were partly supplied in the idealization of the lovers, there is a tendency for this romantic element to fade from their affection.  The conjugal affection which replaces it is built on quite other foundations.  It is not composed of day dreams about the beloved, but is wrought out of mutual interests, of joys and sorrows shared together, of the pleasure of unrestricted companionship, and of the common care of offspring.  The danger lies in the possibility that these foundations for conjugal love will not have been lain by the time that romantic sentiments begin to grow dim.  It is this crisis in the married life which seems disappointing in the afterglow of the engagement and honeymoon.