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Freud was not only monogamie in a very unusual degree, but for a time seemed to be well on the way to becoming uxorious. But just as after a time he recognized that his love ‘was passing from its lyric phase into an epic one,’1 so he was realist enough to know that a happy marriage would be less tempestuous than the emotional period that preceded it. ‘Society and the law cannot in my eyes bestow on our love more gravity and benediction than it already possesses.… And when you are my dear wife before all the world and bear my name we will pass our life in calm happiness for ourselves and earnest work for mankind until we have to close our eyes in eternal sleep and leave to those near us a memory every one will be glad of.’2 A wish that was wholly fulfilled, but a rather unusual one to express in the first weeks of an engagement.
He had already informed her that she must expect to belong entirely to his family and no longer to her own. So the statement he quoted from Meynert a year later that ‘the first condition in every marriage should be the right to expel one's in-laws’ seems to have been a one-sided one.
Mostly, however, his picture of their future was drawn in a lighter vein. ‘All we need is two or three little rooms where we can live and eat and receive a guest and a hearth where the fire for cooking does not go out. And what things there will have to be: tables and chairs, beds, a mirror, a clock to remind the happy ones of the passage of time, an armchair for an hour of agreeable day-dreaming, carpets so that the Hausfrau can easily keep the floor clean, linen tied up in fancy ribbons and stored on their shelves, clothes of the newest cut and hats with artificial flowers, pictures on the wall, glasses for the daily water and for wine on festive occasions, plates and dishes, a larder when we are suddenly overcome with hunger or a guest arrives unexpectedly, a large bunch of keys which must rattle noisily.