That from the man who had once taken to his bed because he had lost $150! Yes, it
took a long time for John D. to conquer worry. He was "dying" at fifty-three-but he lived
to ninety-eight!
Reading A Book On Sex Prevented My Marriage From Going On The Rocks
By
B.R.W.
I hate to make this story anonymous. But it is so intimate that I could not possibly use
my name. However, Dale Carnegie will vouch for the truth of this story. I first told it to
him twelve years ago.
After leaving college, I got a job with a large industrial organisation, and five years later,
this company sent me across the Pacific to act as one of its representatives in the Far
East. A week before leaving America, I married the sweetest and most lovable woman I
have ever known. But our honeymoon was a tragic disappointment for both of us-
especially for her. By the time we reached Hawaii she was so disappointed, so
heartbroken, that she would have returned to the States, had she not been ashamed to
face her old friends and admit failure in what can be-and should be-life's most thrilling
adventure.
We lived together two miserable years in the Orient. I was so unhappy that I had
sometimes thought of suicide. Then one day I chanced upon a book that changed
everything. I have always been a lover of books, and one night while visiting some
American friends in the Far East, I was glancing over their well-stocked library when I
suddenly saw a book entitled Ideal Marriage, by Dr. Van de Velde. The title sounded like
a preachy, goody-goody document. But, out of idle curiosity, I opened it. I saw that it
dealt almost entirely with the sexual side of marriage-and dealt with it frankly and
without any touch of vulgarity.
If anyone had told me that I ought to read a book on sex, I would have been insulted.
Read one? I felt I could write one. But my own marriage was such a bust that I
condescended to look this book over, anyway. So I got up the courage to ask my host if
I could borrow it. I can truthfully say that reading that book turned out to be one of the
important events of my life. My wife also read it. That book turned a tragic marriage into
a happy, blissful companionship. If I had a million dollars, I would buy the rights to
publish that book and give free copies of it to the countless thousands of bridal couples.
I once read that Dr. John B. Watson, the distinguished psychologist, said: "Sex is
admittedly the most important subject in life. It is admittedly the thing which causes the
most shipwrecks in the happiness of men and women."
If Dr. Watson is correct-and I am persuaded that his statement, sweeping as it is, is
almost, if not wholly, true-then why does civilisation permit millions of sexual
ignoramuses to marry each year and wreck all chances for married happiness?
If we want to know what is wrong with marriage, we ought to read a book entitled What
is Wrong With Marriage? by Dr. G. V. Hamilton and Kenneth MacGowan. Dr. Hamilton
spent four years investigating what is wrong with marriage before writing that book, and
he says: "It would take a very reckless psychiatrist to say that most married friction
doesn't find its sources 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."