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Karezza – Ethics of Marriage 1903 second edition – Dr Alice B Stockham

My Dear Dr. Stockham:

A sweet and wise American friend has introduced my dear husband and myself to the pure delights of Karezza, and I should feel myself the basest of ingrates if I left this land without writing you this word of heartfelt thanks; and yet how poor words are to convey real gratitude! We rob words of meaning by our wretched way of using them to express paltry things, and when a benefit has been done one, which enriches - nay, transforms life - the whole world – one has but the same old exhausted words.

For this wonderful discovery is in sober reality a transformer of wedded life.

I am a woman of passion (until now I have always been ashamed of it). My dear husband is a man of passion; until now it has seemed that it was the one blemish on his noble manhood.

How ignorant - nay, how wicked - it all seems now.

But, my dear Dr. Stockham, how does it happen that the most mighty, the most beautiful of the natural desires - that which is at the very foundation of society, and which is connected with all the sanctities of life - marriage, with all it ideally means, motherhood - fatherhood - why is it that this powerful and holy passion has remained under a kind of ban?.............

And now Karezza has come!

How numberless are the benefits! The first and greatest is that, at last, after nine years of legal marriage (and of real love, too), we are really married.

There is not a film of constraint, false modesty, or conventionality between us, and with the downfall of the physical barrier has come such a flowing together of soul as I cannot describe. I really have never known my darling until now. He seems to me more beautiful than ever did the Apollo, and so grand and manly in his continence and self-control, while it is perfectly evident that just I - his nine years’ wife, and twice a mother - am a delight to him, and oh, how satisfying are now the days of happy anticipation and then the happier fulfillment.

Oh, dear joy-giving Dr. Stockham, what satisfaction must be yours as you think how (to thousands, I suppose), you have brought the purest, truest joys of marriage - the real nobility of self-control! Yes, you have brought to light true marriage, and true womanhood as well……….

Those who have an idea of suppressing passion are fatally wrong - vain endeavor - instead of using and giving it its regnant place.

Sir J. and I have had no surer revelation in, or hours of, spiritual exaltation through controlled union, than that this passion which God has made …. a nexus of spirit, soul and body.

Every power, every emotion, every resource of the volitional life, blend with every thrilling nerve of the physical life in the controlled union.

One of the blissful results of this vita nuova, is that we both are perfectly unmoved by others. We are sovereigns in the sphere of our own personal beings. No other crosses the frontier.

Very warmly yours,

(Lady) J.G.C.