The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [182]
These individuals customarily have some mission in life, some task to fulfill, some problem outside themselves which enlists much of their energies…. In general, these tasks are nonpersonal or unselfish, concerned rather with the good of mankind in general, or of a nation in general.…Ordinarily concerned with basic issues and eternal questions, such people live customarily in the widest possible frame of reference…. They work within a framework of values that are broad and not petty, universal and not local, and in terms of a century rather than a moment….20
Further, Professor Maslow saw that self-actualizing people, who live in a larger world, somehow thereby never stale in their enjoyment of the day-to-day living, the trivialities which can become unbearably chafing to those for whom they are the only world. They “…have the wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may have become to others.”21
He also reported “the very strong impression that the sexual pleasures are found in their most intense and ecstatic perfection in self-actualizing people.” It seemed as if fulfillment of personal capacity in this larger world opened new vistas of sexual ecstasy. And yet sex, or even love, was not the driving purpose in their lives.
In self-actualizing people, the orgasm is simultaneously more important and less important than in average people. It is often a profound and almost mystical experience, and yet the absence of sexuality is more easily tolerated by these people…. Loving at a higher need level makes the lower needs and their frustrations and satisfactions less important, less central, more easily neglected. But it also makes them more wholeheartedly enjoyed when gratified.…Food is simultaneously enjoyed and yet regarded as relatively unimportant in the total scheme of life…. Sex can be wholeheartedly enjoyed, enjoyed far beyond the possibility of the average person, even at the same time that it does not play a central role in the philosophy of life. It is something to be enjoyed, something to be taken for granted, something to build upon, something that is very basically important like water or food, and that can be enjoyed as much as these; but gratification should be taken for granted.22
With such people, the sexual orgasm is not always a “mystical experience” it may also be taken rather lightly, bringing “fun, merriment, elation, feeling of well-being, gaiety…. It is cheerful, humorous, and playful—and not primarily a striving, it is basically an enjoyment and a delight.” He also found, in contradiction both to the conventional view and to esoteric theorists of sex, that in self-actualizing people the quality of both love and sexual satisfaction improves with the age of the relationship. (“It is a very common report from these individuals that sex is better than it used to be and seems to be improving all the time.”) For, as such a person, with the years, becomes more and more himself, and truer to himself, he seems also to have deeper and more profound relations with others, to be capable of more fusion, greater love, more perfect identification with others, more transcendence of the boundaries of the self, without ever giving up his own individuality.
What we see is a fusion of great ability to love and at the same time great respect for the other and great respect for oneself…. Throughout the most intense and ecstatic love affairs, these people remain themselves and remain ultimately masters of themselves as well, living by their own standards, even though enjoying each other intensely.23
In our society, love has customarily been defined, at least for women, as a complete merging of egos and a loss of separateness—“togetherness,” a giving up of individuality rather than a strengthening of it. But in the love