1453. But the world does not abound in happy marriages, at any rate not within the terrestrial human sphere. Here marriage and sexuality to an exceedingly great extent are characterised by almost complete confusion. To a great extent marriage has become a kind of erotic bus route on which one can transfer to one marriage after another. Marriage thus constitutes merely stops on this route. People get married and divorced up to three or four times, or until they have reached the "terminus" or statutory limit for the "route" laid down by the authorities. In other cases people enter into "marriages of companionship", and in yet other cases they are satisfied with "going out together", so that they can more easily turn their back on their "spouse" or sexual partner, should a new and presumably better or more charming partner turn up. Then there is "prostitution" with its entire entourage of mental obscenities or psychic primitivity, such as "pimping", "blackmail" and "robbery". When a country is visited or occupied by foreign soldiers, we see too that there is a great deal of very lively sexual activity between these soldiers and the women of the country concerned. Is one to believe that the basis for all these outer erotic phenomena is a question of "marriage", is an unquenchable desire to get "married", have children and thereby replenish the earth? It is of course true that in certain cases "marital love", that is to say amorous love, can really arise, but this love is rarely reciprocated by the other party. It almost always results in its source being to some extent "unhappily in love". Nor should one believe that being mutually and happily in love is the only reason for a couple's married life lasting their entire lifetime. It is to a great extent due to the love for any children that there might be in the marriage, to a sense of obligation to keep a solemn promise that was once made, to unfortunate financial circumstances and to the fear of public censure and the like.
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