According to some modern sexologists, if you can afford a vibrator, have access to the visual stimulation afforded by pornographic video or magazines, have worked through your "hang-ups" to the point where you are open to group sex or other gratification devices, then you are not frustrated in the clinical sense. Never mind that you suffer from hypertension or depression, need tranquilizers, are addicted to drugs, alcohol, or smoking, and feel a desperate emptiness and loneliness.

Despite this seemingly comforting information, most of us want to find one special person with whom we can share our innermost thoughts and feelings. In the crazy "self-gratification first" context of our modern world, it seems old-fashioned to assert that romantic love precedes complete sexual fulfillment; nevertheless, I have found this to be true in both my clinical and life experience.

When two people share a long-lasting, intense relationship, they form a bond of commitment and are joined emotionally, spiritually, and physically. This profound closeness makes both lives richer and more meaningful. The natural marriage they share is a relationship both cherish and neither wants to lose. It is useful to distinguish this kind of natural marriage from casual sexual gratification and compulsive marriage.

Natural marriage has always existed inasmuch as men and women have always fallen in love and wanted to live together. Church and state, very often ruled by men who have renounced family ties, have created what Reich, in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, called the compulsive marriage: a social transaction which contains elements of aggrandizement of property and control over children by parents, and which is meant to be permanent at all costs; an institution which, as society in microcosm, perpetuates rigidity and authoritarianism so that the family becomes the "ideology factory of the society."

In fact, people have always wanted to form couples and then families. Until a few hundred years ago, in Europe the great majority of marriages were contracted by the two partners privately and were not celebrated in church or registered by the state. If the marriage failed, the partners dissolved it with equal privacy. Of course, a couple in love may wish in some way to formalize or sanctify their commitment by beginning it with a public ceremony. But a ceremony for the couple and their friends is not the same as one compelled by social pressure. If human, rather than socio-political, needs are considered, the only obligation of society is to ensure that children are not mistreated and that mothers of dependent children are supported in the case of a separation.

Mount in The Subversive Family, makes the point that the modern increase in divorce and in cohabitation outside marriage, often with children, as well as the fact that many young mothers insist on keeping their babies while not marrying the father, are not signs of the weakening of marriage. On the contrary they show that people care deeply about marriage: they dissolve the marriage when it is a disaster; young mothers wait for a long-term partner they can love and rely on. As Mount remarks, if you look at any person coming out of a marriage break-up you almost inevitably see despair, sadness, and a sense of having fallen out of life and the world; even if a person believes it is right to break up a particular marriage, it is a shattering experience because of the emotional investment in the idea of marriage. Most divorced people, not coincidentally, remarry.

As in previous ages, group life, communal sharing, and the extended family are all subjects of much propaganda as superior ways of life to the "exclusiveness" of the nuclear family. The extended family is largely a myth; when it has existed it has been as a matter of economic necessity as is obvious from the fact that whenever economics have allowed, young couples always moved out and founded a nuclear family. Of course, a marriage or family can contain power struggles, battering of spouses or children, and sexual abuse of children. Humanity is not in good shape, armor against deep feeling is prevalent, and marriage is still often compulsive and therefore a trap. The family is also the arena of our most intense emotions. As Mount points out, to most people who have lived in a marriage any other form of group life is strangely lacking in intensity.

Literature from many countries over thousands of years provides evidence that people consistently fall in love. Natural marriage is the inevitable consequence if the relationship is not interfered with. To church and state it is subversive in the sense that it helps primary feelings and loyalties focused on the partner and children. Under oppression by church or state, individuals find the strength to resist in the intensity of private experience. Jacop Timmerman, in solitary confinement and under frequent torture by the Argentinian fascist regime, kept himself alive by composing a long monologue on the subject of his wife's eyes. It was the strength of Boris Pasternak's private life and the love poems he could write for Olga Ivinskaia (the prototype for Lara in Doctor Zhivago) which enabled him to keep his integrity under communist persecution.

Not every natural marriage becomes a family with children. Now that contraception is possible, having children is not inevitable or obligatory; nor is it any longer a justification of the sexual act to bind it irrevocably to procreation. As a voluntary act, having children can be an extension of the partners' joy in life and in each other. People who have children together outside formal marriage or who get married but know that their marriage can be dissolved at the will of either partner, stay together for emotional reasons, not for Reich's compulsive ones: they know that their difficulties must be worked on with energy and so the knowledge that the marriage can be dissolved becomes one of its strengths. The marriage may have its difficult times, but it is not a trap. Compulsive marriage is a trap in which even insanity is protected by authoritarian structure in the family. Gregory Bateson's work on schizophrenia has shown that a parent who is covertly crazy may drive a child overtly crazy by requiring the child to see the parent as sane. Alice Miller's horrifying book, For Your Own Good, documents how child abuse within the compulsive family produces future violence. Hitler, for example, was beaten brutally by his authoritarian father almost every day: in later life he respected his father. Miller points out that this need of abused children to idealize their parents is what makes them in turn perpetuate the abuse in a new generation. One theory is that Hitler, not having a family of his own to abuse, managed to play tyrant on a very much larger scale; he pushed to the limit his idealization of his father's authoritarian "German-ness," and his rejection of the fact that his father was part-Jewish.

The modern data on child abuse and sexual abuse can be seen as a reason to replace the family with a more diffuse community. But abusive families are held together by power and fear, not love. Violence and sexual abuse are results of compulsive marriage, or of natural marriage gone wrong.

In fact, most marriages have some compulsive elements and some natural ones. Just as it helps to be able to distinguish natural from compulsive marriage in the society as a whole, it also helps to distinguish the natural and compulsive elements within a particular marriage. In the language of this book, the natural elements will be those that further contact and pulsation; the compulsive elements will be the rigid or habitual patterns of dysfunction which reflect the character armor of the partners and the particular way in which the two armors compliment or contrast each other.

A good marriage starts with a deep perception of affinity and contact between a man and a woman; a bad marriage starts with a subconscious recognition that two patterns of human armor can coexist in neurotic equilibrium. In practice most marriages are a mixture of good and bad; of origins in love and origins in neurotic need; of loving contact and of blocks to contact. To the extent that individuals are armored, so will be their marriages. Their family life, or blocking of life, will then produce armor in their children. The vicious circle of armoring in generation after generation can only be broken as the compulsive elements in marriage are minimized and the natural elements flourish. In effective therapy, when the armor dissolves, pulsation comes through on its own; in marriage, when blocks to contact and sexual fusion are dissolved, a naturally functional marriage comes into existence. But the angry "secondary layer" cannot be worked through without difficulty and pain in therapy or marriage. In the latter, the backed-up resentments and grudges which are the marriage's own kind of "frozen history" may have to be brought to the surface and worked through. The partners in the marriage, not a counselor, are the best people to do this work and effect the kinds of changes they both desire.