섹스 트러블
결정적인 이혼사유를 네 가지로 분류한 가운데 그 중에 첫 번째 사유가 부부 간의 섹스 트러블에 있다는 카네기의 분석은 아직도 유효하다고 생각한다.
1. 1. “섹스 트러블”
2. 2. 여가생활등의 (가정생활 태도) 현격한 차이
3. 3. 경제적인 궁핍
4. 4. 정신적 성격 차이
물론 부부사이에 섹스 트러블이 이혼사유의 으뜸이라는 분석에는 이의가 있을 수 있다. 취미 생활이 서로 다르면 결과적으로 각자가 따로 놀기 때문에 각자에게 애인이 생길 수 있어 바람을 피울 기회가 있게 되어 부부간에 섹스트러블을 가져 올 수가 있을 것이며
경제적으로 어려워 즉 실직을 한 경우나 남 보다 못한 경제적 환경 때문에 부부간에 서로 존중감이 생기지 않고 돈 문제로 서로 싸우다 보니 결과적으로 섹스할 마음이 동하지 않을 수 있을 것이며
그리고 서로 정신적으로 통하는 사이가 아니어서 신정아/변양균 처럼 “예술적 동지” 하나 만들지 않으면 바보대열에 동참하는 신세가 되어서 더욱 부부사이에 몸이 멀어지니 섹스 트러블의 결과를 가져올 테니
섹스 문제 때문에 부부 사이가 문제가 있다는 원인 분석은 원인과 결과의 함몰적 잘못이 있을 지도 모른다는 점을 생각해 보지만
그리고 아무리 한국과 미국 문화 차이라고 말할 수도 있겠지만 (한국에선 가장 큰 사유가 돈 문제가 아닐까?) 역으로 결론은 버킹검이라는 말처럼 부부 즉 이혼관계는 부부 사이의 “섹스 트러블” 여부로 판단해 볼 수 있다는 것이다.
아무리 경제적으로 어려워도 물건만 좋으면 기둥서방 역할로도 만족하는 아내가 있을 것이며
아무리 남편이 골프 치고 밖으로 돌아도 밤일 만 잘하면 아침식탁이 달라질 것이며
세상 흘러가는 문학이니 예술이니 사상이니 그런 것 몰라도 “오르가슴” 만 충족하면 부부합일이 되는 것이라고 여기는 부부일터이니 섹스가 최고의 기준인 것은 어렵지 않는 결론이라고 여긴다.
또 하나 역으로 남녀 간 섹스란 강간 도 있는 것처럼 하기 싫어도 해 질 수가 있는 것 또한 섹스 이다. 그런 섹스 이기에 부부 사이에 섹스 트러블이 있다 하더라도 섹스의 기술을 익히면 (섹스의 최고 기술은 부부간에 터놓고 진솔하게 서로의 입장을 듣는 것이다.) 섹스 트러블을 물리칠 수 있다는 것이기에 다시 한 번 자신들을 돌아다 볼 수 있을 것이다.
일단 부부관계 중 "섹스" 에 트러블이 없다고 가정한다면 무슨 이유가 가장 주요한 이유 인지 다시 생각해 보아야 하지 않을까.
내가 말하고 싶은 결론 은 “카네기 인간관계론” 아무리 옛날 책 (미국에서 1930년대 즉 1937년에 초판 발행) 이지만 지금도 직접적 교훈을 주고 있는 좋은 내용의 책이라는 것이다.
다음은 카네기 책 일부 카피임.==========================
walter damrosch married the daughter of James G. Blaine, one of America's greatest orators and one-time candidate for President. Ever since they met many years ago at Andrew Carnegie's home in Scotland, the Damrosches have led a conspicuously happy life.
The secret?
"Next to care in choosing a partner," says Mrs. Dam-rosch, "I should place courtesy after marriage. If young wives would only be as courteous to their husbands as to strangers! An man will run from a shrewish tongue."
Rudeness is the cancer that devours love. Everyone knows this, yet it's notorious that we are more polite to strangers than we are to our own relatives.
We wouldn't dream of interrupting strangers to say, "Good heavens. are you going to tell that old story again!" We wouldn't dream of opening our friends' mail without permission, or prying into their personal secrets. And it's only the members of our own family, those who are nearest and dearest to us, that we dare insult for their trivial faults.
Again to quote Dorothy Dix: "It is an amazing but true thing that practically the only people who ever say mean, insulting, wounding things to us are those of our own households."
"Courtesy," says Henry Clay Risner, "is that quality of heart that overlooks the broken gate and calls attention to the flowers in the yard beyond the gate."
Courtesy is just as important to marriage as oil is to your motor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, the beloved "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," was anything but an autocrat in his own home. In fact, he carried his consideration so far that when he felt melancholy and depressed, he tried to conceal his blues from the rest of his family. It was bad enough for him to have to bear them himself, he said, without inflicting them on the others as well.
That is what Oliver Wendell Holmes did. But what about the average mortal? Things go wrong at the office; he loses a sale or gets called on the carpet by the boss. He develops a devastating headache or misses the five-fifteen; and he can hardly wait till he gets home?to take it out on the family.
In Holland you leave your shoes outside on the doorstep before you enter the house. By the Lord Harry, we could learn a lesson from the Dutch and shed our workaday troubles before we enter our homes.
William James once wrote an essay called on a Certain Blindness in Human Beings." It would be worth a special trip to your nearest library to get that essay and read it. "Now the blindness in human beings of which this discourse will treat," he wrote, "is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves."
"The blindness with which we all are afflicted." Many men who wouldn't dream of speaking sharply to a customer, or even to their partners in business, think nothing of barking at their wives. Yet, for their personal happiness, marriage is far more important to them, far more vital, than business.
The average man who is happily married is happier by far than the genius who lives in solitude. Turgenev, the great Russian novelist, was acclaimed all over the civilized world. Yet he said: "I would give up all my genius, and all my books, if there were only some woman, somewhere, who cared whether or not I came home late for dinner."
What are the chances of happiness in marriage anyway? Dorothy Dix, as we have already said, believes that more than half of them are failures; but Dr. Paul Popenoe thinks otherwise. He says: "A man has a better chance of succeeding in marriage than any other enterprise he may go into. Of all the man that go into the grocery business, 70 per cent fail. Of the men and women who enter matrimony, 70 per cent succeed."
Dorothy Dix sums the whole thing up like this:
"Compared with marriage," she says, "being born is a mere episode in our careers, and dying a trivial incident.
"No woman can ever understand why a man doesn't put forth the same effort to make his home a going concern as he does to make his business or profession a success.
"But, although! to have a contented wife and a peaceful and happy home means more to a man than to make a million dollars, not one man in a hundred ever gives any real serious thought or makes any honest effort to make his marriage a success. He leaves the most important thing in his life to chance, and he wins out or loses, according to whether fortune is with him or not. Women can never understand why their husbands refuse to handle them diplomatically, when it would be money in their pockets to use the velvet glove instead of the strongarm method.
"Every man knows that he can jolly his wife into doing anything, and doing without anything. He knows that if he hands her a few cheap compliments about what a wonderful manager she is, and how she helps him, she will squeeze every nickle. Every man knows that if he tells his wife how beautiful and lovely she looks in her last year's dress, she wouldn't trade it for the latest Paris importation. Every man knows that he can kiss his wife's eyes shut until she will be blind as a bat, and that he has only to give her a warm smack on the lips to make her dumb as an oyster.
"And ever) wife knows that her husband knows these things at-out her, because she has furnished him with a complete diagram about how to work her. And she never knows whether to be mad at him or disgusted with him, because he would rather fight with her and pay for it in having to eat bad meals, and have his money wasted, and buy her new frocks and limousines and pearls, than to take the trouble to flatter her a little and treat her the way she is begging to be treated."
So, if you want to keep your home life happy, Rule 6 is:
Be courteous.
CHAPTER SEVEN
7. Don't Be a "Marriage Illiterate"
dr. katharine bement davis, general secretary of the Bureau of Social Hygiene, once induced a thousand married women to reply very frankly to a set of intimate questions. The result was shocking?an incredibly shocking comment upon the sexual unhappiness of the average American adult. After perusing the answers she received from these thousand married women. Dr. Davis published without hesitation her conviction that one of the chief causes of divorce in this country is physical mismating.
Dr. G. V. Hamilton's survey verifies this finding. Dr. Hamilton spent four years studying the marriages of one hundred men and one hundred women. He asked these men and women individually something like four hundred questions concerning their married lives, and discussed their problems exhaustively?so exhaustively that the whole investigation took four years. This work was considered so important sociologically that it was financed by a group of leading philanthropists. You can read the results of the experiment in What's Wrong with Marriage? by George G. V. Hamilton and Kenneth Macgowan.
Well, what is wrong with marriage? "It would take a very prejudiced and very reckless psychiatrist," says Dr. Hamilton, "to say that most married friction doesn't find its source in sexual maladjustment. At any rate, the frictions which arise from other difficulties would be ignored in many, many cases if the sexual relation itself were satisfactory."
Dr. Paul Popenoe, as head of the Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles, has reviewed thousands of marriages and he is one of America's foremost authorities on home life. According to Dr. Popenoe, failure in marriage is usually due to four causes. He lists them in this order:
1. Sexual maladjustment.
2. Difference of opinion as to the way of spending leisure time.
3. Financial difficulties.
4. Mental, physical, or emotional abnormalities.
Notice that sex comes first; and that, strangely enough, money difficulties come only third on the list.
All authorities on divorce agree upon the absolute necessity for sexual compatibility. For example, a few years ago Judge Hoffman of the Domestic Relations Court of Cincinnati?a man who has listened to thousands of domestic tragedies?announced: "Nine out of ten divorces are caused by sexual troubles."
"Sex," says the famous psychologist, John B. Watson, "is admittedly the most important subject in life. It is admittedly the thing which causes the most ship-wrecks in the happiness of men and women."
And I have heard a number of practicing physicians in speeches before my own classes say practically the same thing. Isn't it pitiful, then, that in the twentieth century, with all of our books and all of our education, marriages should be destroyed and lives wrecked by ignorance concerning this most primal and natural instinct?
The Rev. Oliver M. Butterfield after eighteen years as a Methodist minister gave up his pulpit to direct the Family Guidance Service in New York City, and he has probably married as many young people as any man living. He says:
"Early in my experience as a minister I discovered that, in spite of romance and good intentions, many couples who come to the marriage altar are matrimonial illiterates."
Matrimonial illiterates!
And he continues: "When you consider that we leave the highly difficult adjustment of marriage so largely to chance, the marvel is that our divorce rate is only 16 per cent. An appalling number of husbands and wives are not really married but simply undivorced: they live in a sort of purgatory."
"Happy marriages," says Dr. Butterfield, "are rarely the product of chance: they are architectural in that they are intelligently and deliberately planned."
To assist in this planning. Dr. Butterfield has for years insisted that any couple he marries must discuss with him frankly their plans for the future. And it was as a result of these discussions that he came to the conclusion that so many of the high contracting parties were "matrimonial illiterates."
"Sex," says Dr. Butterfield, "is but one of the many satisfactions in married life, but unless this relationship is right, nothing else can be right."
But how to get it right?
"Sentimental reticence"?I'm still quoting Dr. Butterfield?"must be replaced by an ability to discuss objectively and with detachment attitudes and practices of married life. There is no way in which this ability can be better acquired than through a book of sound learning and good taste. I keep on hand several of these books in addition to a supply of my booklet, Marriage and Sexual Harmony.
"Of all the books that are available, the two that seem to me most satisfactory for general reading are: The Sex Technique in Marriage by Isabel E. Hutton and The Sexual Side of Marriage by Max Exner."
So Rule 7 of "How to Make Your Home Life Happier" is:
Read a good book on the sexual side of marriage.
Leam about sex from books? Why not? A few years ago, Columbia University, together with the American Social Hygiene Association, invited leading educators to come and discuss the sex and marriage problems of college students. At that conference, Dr. Paul Popenoe said: "Divorce is on the decrease. And one of the reasons it is on the decrease is that people are reading more of the recognized books on sex and marriage."
So I sincerely feel that I have no right to complete a chapter on "How to Make Your Home Life Happier" without recommending a list of books that deal frankly and in a scientific manner with this tragic problem.
8. Seven Rules For Making Your Home Life Happier
rule 1: Don't nag.
rule 2: Don't try to make your partner over.
rule 3: Don't criticize.
rule 4: Give honest appreciation.
rule 5: Pay little attentions.
rule 6: Be courteous.
rule 7: Read a good book on the sexual side of marriage.
In its issue for June 1933, American Magazine printed an article by Emmet Crozier, "Why Marriages Go Wrong." The following is a questionnaire reprinted from that article. You may find it worth while to answer these questions, giving yourself ten points for each question you can answer in the affirmative.
9. For Husbands
1. Do you still "court" your wife with an occasional gift of flowers, with remembrances of her birthday and wedding anniversary, or with some unexpected attention, some unlooked-for tenderness?
2. Are you careful never to criticize her before others?
3. Do you give her money to spend entirely as she chooses, above the household expenses?
4. Do you make an effort to understand her varying feminine moods and help her through periods of fatigue, nerves, and irritability?
5. Do you share at least half of your recreation hours with your wife?
6. Do you tactfully refrain from comparing your wife's cooking or housekeeping with that of your mother or of Bill Jones' wife, except to her advantage?
7. Do you take a definite interest in her intellectual life, her clubs and societies, the books she reads, her views on civic problems?
8. Can you let her dance with and receive friendly attentions from other men without making jealous remarks?
9. Do you keep alert for opportunities to praise her
and express your admiration for her? 10. Do you thank her for the little jobs she does for you, such as sewing on a button, darning your socks, and sending your clothes to the cleaners?
10. For Wives
1. Do you give your husband complete freedom in his business affairs, and do you refrain from criticizing his associates, his choice of a secretary, or the hours he keeps?
2. Do you try your best to make your home interesting and attractive?
3. Do you vary the household menu so that he never quite knows what to expect when he sits down to the table?
4. Do you have an intelligent grasp of your husband's business so you can discuss it with him helpfully?
5. Can you meet financial reverses bravely, cheerfully, without criticizing your husband for his mistakes or comparing him unfavorably with more successful men?
6. Do you make a special effort to get along amiably with his mother or other relatives?
7. Do you dress with an eye for your husband's likes and dislikes in color and style?
8. Do you compromise little differences of opinion in the interest of harmony?
9. Do you make an effort to leam games your
husband likes, so you can share his leisure hours?
10. Do you keep track of the day's news, the new books, and new ideas, so you can hold your husband's intellectual interests?